
Class _, 

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V 



The Gate of Death 



A Diary 



QAdZ. ■ 



" But the children began to be sorely weary; and they 
cried out unto Him that loveth Pilgrims, to make the 
way 77iore comfortable " — Pilgrim's Progress, Part II. 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

Zbc Iknickerbocker press 
1906 






4*4 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

NOV 19 1906 



A Copyright Entry 
CUSS f\ /XChWc 
COPY B. 



Copyright, igc6 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Ube IRnicfeerbocfeer ipress, IRew lt?orK 



INTRODUCTION 

Perhaps some of those into whose hands this 
book may fall will be inclined to find fault with 
it for not being what it does not lay claim to be. 
It deals with the saddest, darkest, most solemn, 
most inevitable, most tremendous fact in the 
world — death ; the one event of awful significance 
for every one, small or great, noble or base, wise 
or dull, that is born into this strange world. It 
is not a complete, nor a comprehensive, nor a 
philosophical treatment of the subject ; it is no- 
thing but the record of the sincere and faltering 
thoughts of one who was suddenly and unexpect- 
edly confronted with death, and who, in the midst 
of a very ordinary and commonplace life, with no 
deep reserves of wisdom, faith, or tenderness, had 
just to interpret it as he best could. There are 
many people who have no opportunity of looking 
back upon such experiences at all, whom death 



iv Introduction 

has beckoned away before they have had the time 
to wonder what it meant ; and there are others 
upon whom it has cast such a shadow, that they 
have not the heart to speak of it ; and there are 
others who perhaps would speak of it if they 
could, but who have had no practice in expressing 
their thoughts in writing. I can only say that it 
has seemed to me to be of the nature of a duty to 
speak as plainly and as frankly as possible of my 
great experience: and these pages are meant not 
for the inquisitive or the speculative, not for the 
light-hearted or the indifferent, but for all those 
who feel the shadow of the supreme event of life 
cast backwards over their lives, and who are con- 
scious that day by day they are moving, reluc- 
tantly perhaps and heavily, but whether they will 
or no, to meet what no one can avoid and what all 
must dread — that last adventure that shall divide 
us from all the familiar things that we hold so 
dear, from the love and light that we know, 
even, it may be, from ourselves. 

In these latter days the investigations of science 
have told us much more of what has been and 



Introduction v 

what is than our fathers knew ; but science tells 
us nothing of what we shall be, and thus, by rea- 
son of its explorations into what can be known, 
has even heightened the gloom and the terror of 
the unknown and the unexplored. And thus it 
seems to us, at this point of time, as though the 
more we know of God and the designs of God, 
the less we understand Him ; some da}^ indeed it 
may be that our children, in the light of a fuller 
knowledge, may look back and wonder how we 
can have borne to live thus, with our uncertain 
knowledge, our diminished faith ; but I would 
rather believe that God proportions our faith and 
our courage to our need and to our pain. Such 
value as these pages may possess will be due to 
the fact that the writer has tried, as simply and 
sincerely as he can, to look his experiences stead- 
ily in the face, not to disguise his bewilderment, 
his suffering, and his fear ; and, at the same time, 
not to attempt to explain away, in a faithless and 
despondent spirit, the hopes, the instincts, the 
consolations, that went with him to the brink of 
the dark stream. 
Jan, 1 6, 1906. 



The Gate of Death 

A DIARY 



June 1 6. 
The) great doctor has just left me, and the 
blessed words are still echoing in my ears : "I 
see no reason whatever why you should not, with 
a little care, entirely recover your normal health." 
He tells me that I am perfectly sound, and that 
my constitution is evidently a very strong one. 
He adds with a smile that I seem able to take a 
good deal of knocking about, without being 
materially the worse for it. I wish I could make 
a hymn out of my gratitude and thankfulness, 
could say, in a few sweet, simple words, a tenth 
of what I feel ; as it is, my silent joy goes up to 
God, like a fragrant incense, from the altar of my 
heart . . . the God of my joy and gladness. 
. • . I seem to float to-day upon a sea of 



2 The Gate of Death 

happiness, blue sunlit waves about me, open sky 
above. It seems almost wrong to be so happy as 
I am, and yet I have paid a heavy price for it — it 
was worth paying. My fear of late has been not 
that I should die — I seem to have lost my fear of 
that — but that I should linger on for many years 
in a feeble invalid condition, forbidden to do this 
and that ; forced to rest, to spare myself, to take 
care, to live by rule, to fret about trifles — an in- 
tolerable life. I am to be spared that ! 

The lyrical impulse of joy dies away. How 
soon even joy tires me in my feeble state! Now 
I do not seem to desire to pray, to give thanks, to 
praise God. I feel as if my soul lay open before 
Him, and as if He approved, even rejoiced with 
me ; I feel as if I sate, a tired happy child, on a 
father's knee, my head against his shoulder, safe, 
loved, comforted, with a peace which nothing could 
shake. I always felt before, both in trouble and 
joy, as if something, some intangible fence, kept 
me from Him ; that is all gone now, and to-day 
He is as near me as myself. 

My sister has been in to see me: the doctor has 



The Gate of Death 3 

given her exactly the same account. I had a 
little shade of wonder whether he was not per- 
haps encouraging me more than my condition 
justified, but it seems it is not so. 

By the end of the year I may be at work again ; 
till then I must be content to rest and take things 
easily, and I may hope to improve every day. 
We did not speak much of the good news, but 
she understood. What wonderful creatures women 
are ! My first thought, I fear, was of myself ; but 
I see that my sister is even happier than I. She 
thinks only of me — that is a purer joy than mine ! 

June 18. 
They allow me to write now, so long as I do 
not tire myself: it is an intense relief. It has 
been of late a great trial to one who, like myself, 
has written so much, and whose life has been 
mostly spent in sentence-making, to have to ab- 
stain from all writing. The thoughts have buzzed 
in my brain, like wild bees on a casement seeking 
blunderingly for an exit ; for hours together I 
have shaped phrases and paragraphs. I am 



4 The Gate of Death 

going to try and put down an account of these 
last months, because I have been through some 
very strange experiences. Twice I have stepped 
to the very gate of death, waiting for it to open to 
me ; then twice I have turned my back upon it, 
and walked slowly back to life. Each time the ex- 
perience was so different; and all so utterly unlike 
anything I had ever dreamed of or imagined. 

I^et me begin from the beginning. I have been 
looking at my diary of the early weeks of this 
year. I was working in London till half through 
January at my literary work. It is a dull record 
to read : work most of the day, meeting the same 
people at the club, an occasional dinner-party, a 
Sunday out of town. On the 20th of January I 
finished a difficult piece of work, and feeling a 
little tired, I came down here. This house is a 
pleasant country vicarage in Sussex. My brother- 
in-law is the clergyman of the place, which is a 
very quiet village thirty miles from London. He 
has been married to my sister for ten years, and 
they have two children. My sister is my only 
near relation. I am very fond of the place ; the 



The Gate of Death 5 

surrounding country is beautiful, full of low 
wooded ranges. The vicarage stands high, close 
to the church, and below stretch the remains of 
an ancient forest. We can see the South Downs, 
a line of pure green, on the horizon : they are in 
sight now from my window. 

The life here suits my solitary tastes ; we see 
hardly any one. My brother-in-law and my sister 
are very busy people, for the parish is a scattered 
one. I do exactly what I like, and keep my own 
hours. I spend a good deal of the day in writing, 
walk or ride alone in the afternoon ; in the evening 
I often read aloud what I have written, and have 
the advantage of friendly criticism, for we are all 
fond of literature. It is a perfect life, for we are 
all of one mind, and appreciate each other. We 
have a few visitors from time to time, but we are 
entirely content to be alone. The children are 
delicious, — simple, and happy, — and it seems to 
me that I have all the interest and none of the 
anxiety of a family. 

My accident occurred on the 27th of January, 
and the last entry in the diary was written on the 



6 The Gate of Death 

evening of the 26th, late at night. I see that I 
say that I have quite got over my L,ondon tired- 
ness, and am hard at work sketching out a new 
book ; but the strange thing is that though I can 
remember the journey down here, and the events 
of the first evening, — the children sat up later 
than usual in my honour, and I produced some 
little presents I had brought them — after this my 
mind is a blank, I see the events of the days 
that followed, from the 21st to the 26th, written 
down in black and white, and I have no doubt 
that they occurred as related ; but though I search 
my mind from end to end, I can discover not the 
faintest recollection of them. 

June 19. 
I am told that this is not an uncommon expe- 
rience ; but what a mystery it is ! If memory can 
be thus obliterated, like writing on a slate over 
which a sponge has been passed, does it not look 
as though one's mind was more closely entwined 
than one likes to think with one's body? In 
sleep there seems a sort of subterranean conscious- 
ness. But one's memory does not seem a physical 



The Gate of Death 7 

thing. I suppose that the events of those days 
have left little marks and scratches upon my 
nature. I suppose that at the end of them I was 
not quite the same person that I was at the begin- 
ning, but I have no consciousness of anything 
that took place. 

One's idea of death is that one slips out of the 
body, but that one's mind and memory must still 
be one's own. I have often thought that death, 
by closing all the avenues of sensation, might leave 
one for a time insensible to all impressions, in a 
blind and deaf isolation. I have always believed 
in the preservation of identity, and I have some- 
times wondered whether the reason why the 
spirits of the dead have no power of communi- 
cating with the spirits of the living may not be that 
the soul that has suffered death may have to 
learn its new conditions, just as a child born into 
the world spends weeks and months in a kind of 
insensibility to outward impressions. The con- 
sciousness is there in an infant ; it is obviously 
intensely preoccupied with its own sensations; and 
indeed I have no doubt that the perceptions of 



8 The Gate of Death 

the child are really at its very strongest, because, 
as we grow older, we find those perceptions 
becoming gradually dulled. But a child a few 
months old seems to have no reason and no recol- 
lection. I have often wondered what the little 
mind is doing all that time ; and so I have 
thought that there may be after death a period 
when the spirit is similarly learning what its new 
surroundings are, acquiring perception through 
new avenues of apprehension, with new ideas 
gradually dawning upon it. 

But if that be so, why do we not become more 
conscious of the presence of the spirits of the 
dead, when some time has elapsed after death, 
and when they have learnt the new perception ? 
Can it be that their memory has been destroyed 
with the destruction of the earthly instrument ? 
It is a terrible thought, that all the sweet and 
hoarded treasures of the mind, love and hope, 
delight and beauty, knowledge and power, should 
fade like wreaths of mist, leaving the spirit 
different, no doubt, from what it was before it 
had lived, but yet with no consciousness of all 



The Gate of Death 9 

that it had done and been and thought. And 
yet this destruction of memory in my own case 
seems to point that way. 

On the morning of the 27th of January, I am 
told, I went out for a walk about twelve o'clock, 
after writing some letters. There is a short drive 
from the front door leading down to the road. 
Close to the gate stand three fine Scotch firs, up 
which ivy had been allowed to grow, and the 
trees had begun to suffer ; a month or two before, 
the ivy stems had been carefully cut through 
near the roots, and the plants were now dead, the 
leaves brown and withered. The gardener had set 
a long ladder up against the first tree and was strip- 
ping off the withered tendrils from the trunk. I 
stood, I am told, and watched him ; and when he 
had stripped the first tree, and had set the ladder 
up against the second, I expressed a wish to try 
my hand at the work. I went up to a height of 
some twenty feet. He is not quite clear what 
happened, but he thinks that in reaching round 
the tree to pick off a twining branch, my foot 
slipped off the rung of the ladder, and in trying 



io The Gate of Death 

to recover my hold, I overbalanced and fell pro- 
strate on the ground, upon my back. He says 
that I uttered a stifled cry, half raised myself, 
and then, putting my hand to my head, sank 
back unconscious. I had received a blow on the 
head which had stunned me, but that was one of 
the least serious of my injuries. He got help, 
and I was carried into the vicarage ; a doctor was 
sent for, and I was attended to. My legs were 
paralysed, and it was feared that I had lacerated 
the spinal cord. The doctor did not think that I 
should live through the day, and for a week I 
was more or less unconscious, hanging between 
life and death. But of all these events I have not 
the smallest recollection. 

June 20. 

My return to consciousness is very difficult to 
recall. There seems to me now to have been a 
long period, which passed in a kind of fevered 
twilight ; loud booming sounds often sounded in 
my ears ; a face, strangely distorted, would appear 
close to me and disappear again. Lurid dark- 



The Gate of Death 1 1 

ness, varied by intolerable flashes of light, 
brooded over me ; once or twice I awoke to con- 
sciousness of grinding physical pain, or an excru- 
ciating restlessness ; I was not conscious of myself, 
only of pain. Sometimes I seemed to myself like 
a diver, struggling upwards through dim waters, 
but unable to reach the surface. Once I came 
out quite suddenly on life, as from a dark tunnel, 
and saw two people, both strange to me, bending 
over something which they held in their hands 
close to a bright light. I suppose I made some 
sound, because they both turned towards me, and 
the simple movement afflicted me with an over- 
whelming terror, but the darkness closed in 
again. 

The first real clear fact which I can remember 
is of waking suddenly, and seeing my sister sit- 
ting in what seemed a late afternoon hour by the 
bed. That puzzled me, and I lay some moments 
silent, my eyes fixed on her face; she was read- 
ing, and looked to me worn and pale. She 
looked up suddenly, and said, "Do you know 
me, dear?" It took me a long time to summon 



12 The Gate of Death 

up strength to reply, and when my voice came it 
sounded to me absurdly faint and wasted. * * Yes, * * 
I said, " of course I know you ; but I am not sure 
that I know who /am." When I had said it, it 
seemed to me inconceivably ludicrous for some 
reason, and I remember that I laughed in a 
drowsy way at what appeared to me to be a witty 
repartee. She rose quickly and came up to me, 
and I was then seized with an intense desire to be 
left alone and undisturbed. I should like to have 
smiled, and said some word of affection, but I 
had not the strength to do so ; it did not seem 
worth while ; nothing seemed worth while, except 
that it was happiness to be left alone. She stood 
by me for a little, and then I became aware that 
she went softly back and sate down, and I heard 
her sigh to herself, and then the flutter of a page, 
while I went back with a kind of greedy absorp- 
tion into a slumber that seemed to fill all my 
drowsy frame. I do not think I felt any pain at 
that moment, but I seemed bound hand and foot. 
Then after that the glimpses of life seemed more 
frequent. I became conscious that I was fed at 



The Gate of Death 13 

intervals ; it was horrible to be aroused, but I 
swallowed what was given me in the mere hope 
that I might be left alone. Sometimes I felt a 
cold air on my limbs, and sharp pains — I suppose 
that my hurts were being dressed ; but the pain 
brought a faintness with it, so that I never remem- 
ber any long bout of pain. 

Then at last, in some dead hour of the night, 
I awoke to a fuller consciousness than I had yet 
enjoyed. I was conscious of a dull aching that 
seemed to increase every moment. I tried to 
move, but could not ; then for the first time I 
became aware that something serious must have 
befallen me. I knew where I was, and I realised 
that some one, a dark figure, was sitting by a 
shaded lamp : it was the nurse who was attending 
me, but she was as yet a stranger to me, though 
she had nursed me for a fortnight. Then I 
became conscious of a deadly weakness and faint- 
ness ; my heart fluttered like a wounded bird ; 
and it seemed to me as though my life was only 
tied to me by a single frail thread, and that any- 
thing might snap it. Then for the first time I 



H The Gate of Death 

knew that I was ill, and believed myself to be 
dying. I could have groaned for pain, but a 
strange thought kept me silent. I was so sure 
that I was dying that I felt that, if I betrayed my 
condition, my brother and sister would be sum- 
moned, would stand and kneel beside me, pray 
over me, touch my hand, kiss my brow. The 
thought was insupportable. 

It had always seemed to me a wanton cruelty 
to fill the room of a dying person with relations 
and friends to see him die, when he could not 
remonstrate or resist ; it seemed a hopeless in- 
dignity to have the last agonies watched and 
noted. If the sense of privacy dictates that one 
should undress, and lie down to sleep, and rise 
to dress again, alone, it had always seemed to me 
that when the spirit was about to lay aside its 
human vesture for ever, it might at least demand 
to suffer death in solitude. To perform the last 
sad act of failing life surrounded by curious 
gazers: the thought was intolerable! To set the 
poor body at its feeblest, with the mind weakened 
by disease, on a stage, as it were, for others to 



The Gate of Death 15 

behold its last sobbing breaths, its involuntary 
cries — this always appeared to me a horrible 
thing ; it did not seem true affection to wish to 
accompany the last stumbling steps of the trem- 
bling frame to the door of death. And so I lay 
quiet, thankful that death, which I knew was 
close upon me, should come thus when I was 
alone. My mind was so strangely set upon that 
one desire for solitude, that I hardly thought at 
all of what death meant. All I could do was just 
to bear the dull pain, just to endure the uncanny 
fluttering of the heart that warned me that it had 
hardly strength to do its task. It was not the 
pain that oppressed me : it was the feeling of 
utter weakness, of the lapsing of all vital energy, 
that held me speechless ; but soon the fluttering 
seemed to cease, and my heart began to beat more 
firmly. Then I suppose I fell asleep, for when I 
awoke it was day, and I was aware that I was still 
in the body; but there was no joy about the 
thought, rather a regret, that I was called back to 
life, and that I had not made the last passage that 
I had always dreaded in that dumb and silent hour. 



1 6 The Gate of Death 

June tl. 

I felt that next day, I remember, as a man 
might feel who has been driven backwards by 
merciless foes from room to room of a great house, 
until he is aware that he is come to the last. I 
was in my last stronghold : everything seemed to 
have left me — joy, pride, hope, the desire of 
beauty, the pleasures of the mind, love itself; 
there was nothing left but just life. If I were 
adorning a tale, making a creditable narrative, I 
should perhaps have written that love survived, 
but it did not : it was not that it was gone, or 
destroyed ; it was merely that I had no time or 
power to think of anything else, in the world or 
out of it, but just the remnant of life itself. I 
was like a man holding on to a rock-ledge, know- 
ing that a fall means death, and instinctively 
intent on nothing else but clinging as long as he 
can. It was not that I desired life or feared 
death: I desired and feared nothing. I merely 
watched life, as a man might watch an expiring 
flame, absorbed in the wonder whether it would 
be extinguished or not. 



The Gate of Death 17 

I remember how once, in Switzerland, I had 
climbed to a grass} 7 place among crags, and 
sitting there among some rocks, I fell asleep. 
When I awoke, there was a marmot, which had 
crept out of its hole a few feet from me, nibbling 
something which it held in its paws. I lay, I 
recollect, hardly daring to breathe for fear of dis- 
turbing it, wholly intent on watching the pretty, 
unconscious beast. It was thus that I felt, 
watching the little life that was left, not know- 
ing that it might not at any instant dart away 
and disappear. I felt absurdly small and insig- 
nificant ; I did not expect to live, and only 
waited to see if I should die ; I had no memories 
of life, and no speculations as to the future. 
They thought that I was dying too, and that af- 
ternoon my brother-in-law, Frank, gave me the 
Sacrament. I am surprised now to think how 
indifferent I was to that. I watched his motions, 
I heard the words he said, I received the ele- 
ments ; but my chief thought then was that 
the act disturbed me in my watching the 
frail life, which indeed seemed the only 



1 8 The Gate of Death 

thing left me. The rest of the day passed like 
a dream. 

June 25. 
In the course of the next few days, I think I 
struggled back feebly to life ; I still thought that 
I should die, but I ceased to expect it every mo- 
ment. The first emotion that came back to me 
was affection ; I felt it mostly in the form of 
compassion for those who were evidently so much 
distressed at what seemed to me a thing of very 
little moment. I had a sense of gratitude for the 
care and tenderness that were centred on me ; a 
certain sorrow that I should give so much 
trouble. I tried once or twice to put it into 
words ; I even tried to explain that it was not 
worth while to expend so much feeling over a life 
that seemed to have been so emptied of all ele- 
ments that make up life. I still felt the same 
strange sorrow at moments that I had not died 
while I was unconscious ; I seemed so utterly 
tired that I did not even wish to realise that I was 
dying, and even the sensation of returning life 
made me feel as a man might feel who struggles 



The Gate of Death 19 

wretchedly up a steep rock-face out of the reach 
of a rising tide. The waves wash his feet ; with 
infinite exertion he struggles a few inches higher, 
and again the tide reaches him. It did not seem 
worth the labour of resisting, of holding on, until 
one morning I suddenly became aware that the 
tide had turned, and that I had the will and de- 
sire to live ; there were times even after that 
when I sank back again, but the strange sense of 
powerlessness had gone and I had no longer any 
doubt that I wished to live. After that my pro- 
gress seemed rapid ; the zest of the mind began 
to come back ; I began to feel a desire to know 
what was happening in the world; I wished to be 
read to, though there often came times when I 
seemed unable to attend to the sense ; still the 
mere words helped me, like a soft music, stirring 
in me long and vague trains of thought. 

Then in the long hours when I was much alone 
and could not sleep, in the darkened room, with 
a shaded light burning, with the slow ticking of 
the clock, memory came to my aid, bringing 
back the scenes of the past with incredible reality, 



20 The Gate of Death 

so that at times it even seemed as if people long 
dead came near and spoke and smiled. 

I was a child again in the old Rectory where 
I was born and brought up; I could wander 
through the rooms of the house, looking at the 
pictures, the books, the furniture; I could see 
myself at play in the great attic : the very scents 
of the house, the fragrance of newly made bread, 
the scent of the apples ranged in rows on the 
shelves of the store-room, came to me. I walked 
along the grass paths of the little garden, in the 
larch plantation with its tender green leaves, its 
sharp aromatic smell ; I could see the flowers in 
the borders, the big flies that hummed suddenly 
in the sunshine, the very bricks of the wall, the 
gravel of the path. I had not known how in- 
delibly the whole thing was imprinted on my 
mind. 

Then I saw myself a boy at school ; I wandered 
through the big dormitory with its open fireplace, 
its dusty cubicles ; I sate in the old dark school- 
rooms, with the ink-stained desks carved with 
hundreds of names; I could see the brightly 



The Gate of Death 21 

lighted chapel at evensong, the rows of boys, the 
flaring lights ; I could hear the soft thunder of 
the organ and the sound of singing. How many 
forgotten scenes came up before me then ! I lived 
through them again, some of them happy enough 
and lighthearted, some of them miserable. I felt 
again the joy of little successes, the pain of little 
failures. I blamed myself for stupidities, cold- 
nesses, unkindnesses. I felt remorse for the 
waste of golden hours, for perversities, for in- 
difference. How easy, it seemed now, it might 
have been to have been strong, courageous, and 
strenuous ! How purposeless a drifting it all 
seemed to have been, and what a beautiful thing 
it might have been made ! 

Sometimes I lived my college life over again : 
there had been more happiness there, because 
there had been more freedom. I remembered with 
pleasure the free cheerful life, the happy inter- 
change of talk, the keen out-door activities, the 
pleasant firelit hours, when we were all young 
and brisk together ; but the memory turned with 
a curious persistence rather to the early days, and 



22 The Gate of Death 

renewed with a sense of half-delicious pain the 
sweet hours that had seemed so ordinary and 
obvious at the time, and all the love with which 
I had been surrounded. I could see my father 
coming into the nursery, strong and cheerful, to 
take me out for a walk ; I could see myself 
trotting along the lanes with my mother, going 
to some simple festivity ; I could see the great 
lawn at the Hall, with the tea-table laid under 
the tall sycamore, with the pleasant group of 
kindly people, loving life and talk and simple 
pleasure, with the excited and eager children all 
about them. 

The long happy days of the holiday times 
spent by the sea or among the hills came back 
to me. The sea — I could smell the sharp, briny 
savours, and hear it hiss along the sand, brim- 
ming the rock-pools ; from morning to night one 
used to wander up and down the beach, storing 
up tiny treasures from the wrack, catching, alas, 
the pretty tiny sea-beasts, and imprisoning them 
in stagnant aquariums. 

One of the thoughts that saddened me in those 



The Gate of Death 23 

silent hours was the thought of the heedless pain 
one inflicted as a child on the little tender crea- 
tures — insects, crabs, butterflies ; catching, kill- 
ing, maiming with no intentional cruelty, but 
treating them only as pleasant toys, from mere 
lack of imaginative sympathy. I do not know 
how children can be taught otherwise. In the 
old severe story books, papa pinches Tommy 
to show him how he hurts the beetle. Tommy 
does not in the least understand that the beetle 
is hurt like that, and merely thinks papa unkind. 
The egotism of the child is so all-absorbing that 
he cannot put his thoughts outside of himself; 
he can be made to obey by fear of punishment or 
displeasure ; but he has no sense of justice or 
equality ; he does not see why, when a thing is 
in his power, he should not use it as he wills. 
But the thought came to me in those hours, with 
a fruitless and helpless sadness, of all the pain in 
the world, that seems so unnecessary, so unten- 
der, so fortuitous, so unevenly and wantonly dis- 
tributed. Either it is so, or else pain is not the 
evil that we think it. If onty we could feel at 



24 The Gate of Death 

the time that we were gaining anything, that the 
price we paid was heavy, but still worth paying ! 
But pain has no seed of hope in it at the time ; it 
only seems unmanning, weakening, marring ; 
spoiling our happiness, and not giving us any- 
thing in return, except perhaps a heightened 
sense of gladness when it is over, and not 
always even that : often it gives nothing but a 
formless and desperate horror, and dread of a 
world where there is so much that is at once 
mysterious and terrible. 

I was suffering little pain myself in those dark 
days ; sometimes I had days of dull aching, days 
of great restlessness, of fretful impatience ; but of 
sharp agony I had but little, and I am very 
thankful for that, because it allowed me to reflect, 
as I began more and more to do, over the strange 
thing that had so nearly happened to me. If I 
had experienced much pain, it would have so 
bewildered and shattered me that I could have 
only seen the whole through a mist of horror and 
suffering ; but now as I regained strength and 
came back by slow degrees to life, I was able to 



The Gate of Death 25 

look the experience steadily and firmly in the face. 
I do not know that I can give my thoughts at all 
connectedly ; but I am going to try and put down 
some of the ideas that visited me as I became 
aware that I had indeed been standing at the very 
threshold of death. I will trace them as clearly 
as I can ; but the first thing that I will put down 
is perhaps the greatest thing of all : there is no 
terror to the dying about death at all. It seems 
the most simple and natural thing in the world 
when it comes. I am as afraid, alas, of suffering 
as ever : I am not afraid of death. When one 
meditates upon it in life and health it seems an 
intolerable and humiliating thing ; one fancies 
oneself dragged reluctant and protesting to the 
open door, and thrust in, as the evil spirits in the 
Pilgrim" s Progress forced the man into the door 
on the hill ; but there was no reluctance, no ter- 
ror, no sense of injustice, no more than one would 
feel about sleep — one does not resent that tem- 
porary suspension of consciousness, but rather 
welcomes it as a natural and wholesome pleas- 
lire ; and it is even so with death itself. 



26 The Gate of Death 

June 28. 

Thinking over the experience of those strange 
days, what remains with me most strongly is the 
thought of the emptiness of spirit which fell 
upon me. My soul was like a fire that is nearly 
extinguished ; the seed of flame was withdrawn 
alike from the fuel and the ashes, and lay, as it 
were, smouldering in one single cinder ; thought 
and feeling alike were numbed, and I had not 
even strength enough to be afraid. I was just 
conscious of life, hardly even of identity. There 
remains to me an intense psychological interest 
about the process, because the slow recovery of 
normal life taught me this : it showed me, so to 
speak, the different strata of my own nature, the 
order in which the different faculties and emotions 
lay; it taught me which lay deep, and which 
were shallow and superficial feelings. 

I have always held that the motives which 
actuate people are of two kinds, conventional 
motives and inner motives. We do many things 
almost mechanically, because we have been accus- 
tomed to do them, because other people do them ; 



The Gate of Death 27 

not because we have a strong prepossession in 
favour of them, but because it saves us the 
trouble of making decisions and forming pur- 
poses. Down below these superficial motives lie 
the deep inner motives of action, the true vital 
instinctive impulses of our nature. People are 
great and small according as they act by the inner 
motives or by the superficial motives. Ordinary 
conventional people often act for the whole of their 
lives on surface motives ; people of force and 
will act in accordance with the deeper and more 
instinctive motives. The most startling and sur- 
prising things in life are the occasions when, in 
some ordinary and conventional life, the inner 
nature suddenly asserts itself and rises to the sur- 
face. Let me give an instance within my own 
knowledge. 

A very commonplace sensible clergyman of 
my acquaintance suddenly disappeared from his 
parish, leaving a wife and children behind him. 
A few days after he wrote to his bishop resign- 
ing his living ; little by little the story came 
out : he had eloped with the wife of one of his 



28 The Gate of Death 

parishioners in a moment of irresistible passion. 
He had thrown all considerations to the winds ; 
he was a poor man, he had lived the most re- 
spectable and virtuous of lives, and this immense 
force of passion had thus overwhelmed him. He 
had simply been unable to resist ; he had not 
thought of his wife and children, of his position, 
of the scandal his act would cause ; he had not 
even calculated how he was going to live. Some 
time afterwards I went to see him, at his request. 
He was living in abject poverty, and told me a 
sad tale of his repentance and remorse. "I 
know what I have done," he said, in deep agony 
of mind ; * ' I know that I have ruined myself 
and those dear to me ; but I must ask you to 
believe me when I say that I could not have 
acted otherwise. I lose myself/ ' he went on, 
" in thinking why this terrible impulse was sent 
to me. I have sifted my whole life to see what 
there was in it that deserved this punishment, 
and I say honestly that I cannot understand. It 
is useless to say that I ought to have thought of 
this and that : I did think of everything. I 



The Gate of Death 29 

prayed, I suffered agonies ; but I felt like a man 
caught in a current of hopeless strength, where 
resistance was useless. I tell you I could no 
more resist than a lamb caught up by an eagle 
can resist. If God was on my side in my strug- 
gles, I can only say that there is something in 
the world which is stronger than God. My most 
grievous temptation is to pray, not to God to 
forgive me, but to that other dreadful power to 
sustain me in what I have done. ' ' 

That is an instance of a man who acts in obe- 
dience to some disastrous inner force of tempera- 
ment. In my own case, the fact of having had, 
so to speak, to begin life again from the begin- 
ning, showed me with a strange certainty of 
revelation what the inner forces of life really 
were. 

I remember how once some engineers, in a 
place where I was living, had to sink a great 
iron receptacle in the ground. The place was 
a wide river-valley, a plain of alluvial gravel. 
They dug a pit for the purpose, and when they 
had reached a certain depth the springs broke in. 



30 The Gate of Death 

It seemed useless to contend against them. Ac- 
cordingly they brought two strong pumping- 
engines to the place, and proceeded to attempt to 
pump the gravel-bed dry. For a week, night 
and day, a great stream of the purest spring 
water poured away ; at the end of the time they 
had only reduced the level of the water a foot or 
two, though thousands of gallons of water had 
run to waste ; and it was then found that all the 
surface wells in the immediate neighbourhood had 
been lowered. The gravel-bed was of immense 
extent and full of water ; instead of emptying a 
single pit they had drained the whole area. 

This was what had befallen myself. My life 
had, so to speak, been drained away at the 
centre, and the result was that the scattered wells 
of conventional motive over the whole area of 
my existence were dried up. I began to realise 
what was the real deep current of life, what were 
the ideas and instincts which really sustained 
me. As the well of life began slowly to fill, 
the deep, real, vital thoughts came back first. 
Emotion returned first, then intellectual life, and 



The Gate of Death 3 1 

then, at an infinite distance, came back the social 
and conventional ways of thought, considerations 
of money, position, ambition, and influence, which 
I had thought had played a larger part in my 
spirit, though I found now that they had only 
taken up a larger share of my attention. 

I will try and trace this process more in detail: 
it is necessary to be perfectly frank in such a 
matter. Let it then be understood that as my 
thoughts returned to me, like hovering birds to 
an empty dovecot, I learnt, to my great surprise, 
and I will say humiliation, which of these 
thoughts were the most loyal and faithful, which 
represented the innermost side of my character 
and temperament. I learnt indeed the composi- 
tion, to use a chemical phrase, of this complex 
essence which I knew as myself. 

June 29. 

When I look back at my experience of thus 
being confronted with death, and ask myself 
what, in that dark hour, were the memories that 
I treasured, I have little difficulty in answering. 

I cared not at all for my personal successes ; 



32 The Gate of Death 

not at all about the little position I had achieved; 
not at all about having laboured steadily and 
conscientiously — all those things seemed un- 
real and immaterial. I did not even care to 
think that I had, however fitfully and feebly, 
tried to serve the will of God, tried to discern it, 
tried to follow it. In that hour was revealed to 
me that I could not have done otherwise, that 
all my life, success and failure alike, had been 
but a minute expression of that supreme will 
and thought. What I did care about was the 
thought that I had made a few happier, that I 
had done a few kindnesses, that I had won some 
love. I was glad that there had been occasions 
when I had conquered natural irritability and 
selfish anxiety, had said a kind and an affection- 
ate thing. Rectitude and prudence, they seemed 
to matter nothing ; what oppressed me was the 
thought that I might have been readier to do 
little deeds of affection, to have been more 
unselfish, more considerate. 

Small incidents, long forgotten or forgiven, I 
doubt not, by those who were dear to me, came 



The Gate of Death *33 

back to me with a throb of sorrow. I remem- 
bered, for instance, how my sister, one morning 
not so long before, had got out for me a number 
of papers on which she wanted my opinion. I 
was hard pressed with work, and when I w r as 
summoned at the time I had named, I said that 
I could not attend to the matter. She had put 
the papers away again, smiling, and saying that 
another time would do just as well ; and I went 
back to my work. Such little things as that, and 
there were many such, came back to me then. 
It may be thought that these were unimportant 
things enough. I do not know ; I can only say 
that they seemed to me to have been the things 
which mattered. 

What I did desire with all my heart was that 
I should be loved, remembered, regretted, that 
I should leave behind, at least in a few hearts, 
a sweet and fragrant memory ; and what I did 
bitterly regret was that my absorption in my 
work and in myself had left me so little at 
leisure to make the lives of others sweeter and 
happier. If life were given back to me, I felt 

3 



34 The Gate of Death 

how different I would be. It has been given 
back ; and I am not, alas ! as different as I 
hoped. 

July 2, 3, and 4. 

I have always been a convinced Christian ; I 
was brought up in simple orthodox ways, and 
as a boy took Christianity for granted as an 
absolute and unquestioned fact ; I accepted the 
doctrines of Christianity much as I accepted the 
laws of nature. For instance, when, as a boy, I 
was taught science and mathematics, I became 
aware that, through the created scheme of things, 
there ran laws of great mystery and complexity, 
the laws of electricity, of light, of heat ; as I 
learnt more I became aware that, though in 
minute particulars my own limited experience 
confirmed these laws, yet there were many laws 
of which I did not understand the working, and 
again probably other laws the very existence of 
which was unknown to me. The statements of 
Christian doctrine, such as the doctrine of the 
Trinity, the consubstantial nature of the Son, the 
procession of the Holy Spirit, appeared to me to 



The Gate of Death 35 

be laws of this kind, the truth of which I did not 
doubt, although my own actual experience did 
not in any way confirm them. 

At the University I went through a period of 
religious speculation, which made me aware that 
much of the fabric of Christian doctrine was 
probably only a human attempt to state in 
philosophical or metaphysical terms truths which 
were derived from hints and suggestions made by 
Christ Himself and the sacred writers of Scrip- 
ture. These doctrines I began to see were 
scientifically unverifiable, and appeared to me to 
be the result of a human desire to be definite 
and precise ; an attempt, that is, to treat in a 
scientific way statements which were perhaps not 
intended to be precise. But I did not go further 
than this, and I was content to feel that Scripture 
made no attempt to state doctrine in direct terms, 
but that the work of the theologian was to deduce 
principles and truths out of statements made 
rather with a psychological than with a philo- 
sophical motive. I tended then to leave the 
dogmatic side of Christianity alone, and to 



36 The Gate of Death 

confine myself more to the spiritual and mystical 
apprehension of it. 

I never had the slightest difficulty in believing 
in God. There indeed my experience confirmed 
at every point the statements of theologians. 
Next to my own identity there seemed nothing 
in the world so certain as the fact that there was 
outside of me a vast creative Will that had made 
all things, and had laid down laws by which all 
things were guided. Of course there was much 
that was mysterious even then. If God was, as 
theologians taught, so entirely and whole-heart- 
edly on the side of what was good and pure and 
happy, it seemed a question of intolerable diffi- 
culty as to where and how evil and suffering had 
contrived to be intruded into the scheme ; if not 
originated, it must at least have been permitted. 
Evil, it seemed to me, must have been anterior 
to any choice exercised by man; I did not see how 
he could choose evil rather than good, unless the 
evil was there already. 

Then, too, the comprehension of Evolution as 
an undisputed principle showed me that man had 



The Gate of Death 37 

probably not fallen from a state of innocence, but 
was struggling upwards from a lower and more 
bestial condition. Evil in its grossest forms, such 
as lust and cruelty, had existed for thousands of 
centuries in the animal world, before the arrival 
of man upon the scene. I was disposed to believe 
that it became sin as soon as man had risen high 
enough to be conscious of the power of volition and 
choice; but even that left unexplained the exist- 
ence of so gigantic a tradition of pain and suffer- 
ing in the world. The tendency of animals to 
prey on each other, the ravages of disease, had 
existed for hundreds of ages before man appeared 
upon the scene ; and the supreme difficulty lay 
in the attempt to conceive of an omnipotent 
and benevolent God, who created so many sen- 
tient beings with an instinct for happiness and 
life, and then allowed so large a possibility of 
suffering and death to be intermingled with His 
design. 

Still, when I came to the establishment of 
Christianity, I felt on surer ground. I realised 
that in the person of Christ, even subtracting 



38 The Gate of Death 

from the records the possibilities of error and 
exaggeration, there appeared a figure intensely 
human, and yet with a perception of inner and 
spiritual truth which seemed quite out of the 
range of humanity. 

The miraculous element of the Gospels 
troubled me little, though I had rather it had not 
been there, for it seemed to me that if one ac- 
cepted the miraculous element without question, 
one was in the position of believing that God had 
allowed Himself at a point of time and in an 
arbitrary manner to set aside His own universal 
laws ; and thus, though I was not in a position to 
deny the possibility of miraculous occurrences 
having attended the life of Christ, yet I was dis- 
posed to hope that in an age when a belief in 
miraculous occurrences was universal, the proba- 
bility was that a supernatural colour was easily 
given to occurrences which were not necessarily 
supernatural. 

The unsatisfactory part of the case for miracles 
must always be that there is no miracle which 
is attested by absolutely irrefragable evidence ; 



The Gate of Death 39 

and that if it had been a part of the design of 
God, working in Christ, to attest the truth 
of the Christian revelation by miracles, it would 
have been easy to have done some miraculous 
deed, or a series of miraculous deeds, which 
would have taken their place, without any 
doubt, as historical occurrences which no reason- 
able man could henceforth doubt. But with the 
miracles of the Gospel this is not the case. The 
records are the records of very simple-minded 
people, who were not disposed to find any partic- 
ular difficulty in the possibility of miraculous 
occurrences ; and moreover there is no converg- 
ing historical testimony in their favour. They 
must, indeed, from the historical point of view, 
be relegated to the class of statements for which 
the evidence is not complete or convincing. | 

But the personality of Christ stands out above 
all, like a peak among low ridges, as a personal- 
ity which the reporters of His deeds and words 
were utterly incapable of conceiving or invent- 
ing ; and His teaching seemed to me, when I 
endeavoured to approach it in an entirely un- 



40 The Gate of Death 

biassed spirit, to be teaching not of the world 
but above the world. 

And then, too, the belief in the Spirit of God 
seemed to be confirmed by my own experience ; 
there was undoubtedly a holy influence abroad 
in the world, working secretly and surely in the 
hearts of men, turning them from all that was 
mean and vile and hateful, and bidding them 
hold to whatever was pure and noble, visiting 
them indeed when they erred against light with 
an unmistakable sense of failure and shame. 

Thus on the spiritual side the apprehension of 
Christian truth seemed to me to be a reasonable 
and vital process. I confess that I drew more 
and more away from ecclesiastical traditions and 
organisations, into a region of individual faith. 
Every one, it seemed to me, must approach the 
central truth from his own point of view ; and 
I saw increasingly in ecclesiastical ordinances 
and theological dogma an attempt to impose the 
theories of hard, precise, and unspiritual minds 
upon men ; I began to see that ecclesiasticism 
was one of the most dangerous enemies of that 



The Gate of Death 4 1 

liberty of thought which I seemed to discern to 
have been Christ's ideal. Thus the whole of the 
Calvinistic theory of the scheme of salvation, the 
satisfaction of outraged justice by the substitution 
of a pure victim, came to be a merely incredible 
doctrine ; and the sufferings of Christ appeared to 
be only the truth that He submitted Himself, for 
the sake of common humanity, to the fiercest 
and most horrible assaults of suffering and 
shame upon the mortal nature, so that all men 
might feel that, however dark a road they had to 
tread, His own path was marked by blood- 
stained footprints before them ; and yet that He 
had never for a moment lost His perfect courage, 
His all-embracing love. 

I see now that though I had tried, so far as I 
could, to simplify and vitalise my religion, yet 
there had lain about me a whole network of 
instinctive traditions and inherited beliefs. I 
had not been simple enough. I had been misled 
by my education, my temperament, my beliefs, 
into thinking that religion was still a complicated 
and difficult matter ; that there were problems 



42 The Gate of Death 

that I must try to solve, difficulties that I must 
make some attempt to harmonise. I had often 
striven to address my prayers to the Saviour, to 
remind myself of His humanity, to plead His 
sufferings. I had forced myself into the belief 
that evil and suffering were no part of God's 
design ; that they grew out of His gift to us of 
free-will ; that it was to Christ rather than to the 
Father of all, that I must, in virtue of His 
stainless humanity, appeal. 

Now, as I disengaged myself from the terrible 
state of feeling which I have described, when I 
seemed to be clinging to mere life, like a sailor 
shipwrecked in a ravenous sea ; as soon as that 
intense and absorbing preoccupation, that seemed 
to afford me no time or occasion for any other 
thought, left me, two emotions came back to me ; 
the first, of which I will speak later, was an 
intense and tender consciousness of the love of 
those I held most dear, a deep gratitude for the 
emotion which my affliction seemed to evoke; 
and with that came a wide love for the whole 
beautiful world, for the little race of men, faring 



The Gate of Death 43 

on so patiently to the unknown goal ; and then, 
next to that, came back an intense sense of God 
and His fatherly nearness to me, that swallowed 
up all other thoughts, and on the surface of 
which all my old religious beliefs and opinions 
seemed to drift like broken seawrack upon a wide 
ocean. I seemed, with all other created things, 
to lie in the hollow of His hand. Even though I 
wondered in a dim way why we should be so 
sadly afflicted, why we should have to suffer and 
die, I could not doubt the infinite width and 
depth of His love : He seemed to have leisure, 
even in the midst of His immense business with 
all the revolving stars of heaven, bearing millions 
of living races, the very form and fashion of which 
were unknown to me, leisure to look down upon 
me, His frail and suffering child, with perfect 
understanding and perfect love. I was secure, I 
was safe ; the worst that could happen to me, 
however much I dreaded it and agonised under 
it, was all a part of His vast Will ; in those hours 
nothing came between me and my God ; the 
history of man, the sacred revelations, the myriad 



44 The Gate of Death 

laws of the universe rolled away like a mist, and 
left me, a single sentient point in the Almighty 
heart. 

I felt that nothing, no human conception how- 
ever august, no law however ancient, no tradition 
however jealously taught, could ever again sweep 
in between me and that awful presence. I had 
neither fear nor regret. As for the countless 
failures and sins of my life, my frail desires, my 
timid hopes, my mean passions, they were all in 
His heart ; I had no need to think of them, to 
confess them, to repent of them ; they were God's 
concern, and mine no longer. 

I knew that if I came back to life the same web 
would be woven again : I should have anxious 
decisions to make, I should be beset by fears and 
cares, I should be weary often, happy often ; but 
I should live, I hoped, in a different spirit, trust- 
ful, hopeful, loving. I felt that it mattered 
nothing to God what I knew, what I believed, 
what abstract propositions I had mastered, what 
my place, my influence, might be ; all that 
mattered was that I should turn to Him at every 



The Gate of Death 45 

moment with perfect confidence and trust. I felt 
that the poor body with which I was burdened, 
with all its low desires for ease and comfort, was 
but a vesture that wrapped a heavenly spirit ; 
that if I laid it aside in corruption, I should be 
closer to His heart. That body, were I given 
back to life, would be clamorous and ailing often ; 
it would no doubt again seem to distract me from 
Him, to push between me and the sun. But even 
that would be a part of His will, and I could bear 
even that, once satisfied as I had been with His 
likeness. I thought that I should never despise 
holy influences and ordinances that might serve 
to remind me of God ; but that I would test them 
in the future not by their traditional values, but 
by the test whether they indeed did bring me 
closer to the Father : Whom I w T ould worship in 
spirit and in truth, and not according to the rites 
of men. 

I dare not say that since I have returned to life 
and health I have not forfeited something of that 
tremendous intuition, that divine liberty. Alas ! 
what others expect of one, one's desire not to 



46 The Gate of Death 

disappoint or hurt those whom one loves, and 
who hold such traditions dear, are sad motives to 
keep silence. But it is in this spirit that I think 
of things that are sacred to others, even though 
they are not immediately sacred to myself ; that 
submission to them is indeed a sacrifice to love ; 
and that love is a truer and purer principle to 
follow even than truth itself. 

But since that day I can say that for myself 
truth and love are so inextricably intertwined 
that I can see little difference between them ; and 
in dealing with these things, I desire to hold 
rather to the larger principle of loving-kindness 
and simplicity, than to satisfy my taste for 
logical definition. God and the soul ! those are 
the two things which after all are true. 

July 7 and 8. 

It was in the middle of all this that I suffered 
a second blow. I was struggling back into a sort 
of broken life ; I had been warned to be careful, 
to commit no kind of imprudence ; but one hot 
day in the spring I imprudently exposed myself 



The Gate of Death 47 

to a draught, and took a chill. In my enfeebled 
state, this turned to a slight inflammation of the 
lungs ; it would not have been serious if I had 
been stronger. The fever was never high, and 
soon abated. I had a few days and nights of 
restless misery, accompanied with a certain 
amount of pain, but the attack passed off. 

One morning, however, I was sitting up in bed, 
making some pretence to read, when I was sud- 
denly seized with a desperate faintness. The nurse 
was with me, and the doctor was summoned in 
haste. I was fully conscious, and moreover fully 
aware that I was in imminent danger. I could see 
that my looks alarmed those about me ; it was a 
heart failure. I experienced nothing but a dis- 
tressing breathlessness, and at intervals the sense 
of deadly faintness. I believe that I was kept 
alive by inhaling oxygen, and by hypodermic 
injections of strychnine ; I was made to lie per- 
fectly flat, and warned not to move hand nor foot. 
This time I had no doubt whatever from my own 
sensations that I was going to die ; but this time, 
too, my mind was absolutely unclouded. Again, 



48 The Gate of Death 

I thankfully say, I felt no fear ; what went on in 
my mind was not in that region at all. I did not 
speculate as to what was before me, but with a 
curious matter- of-factness I surveyed the mate- 
rial consequences of my death. I thought of the 
suspension of my work, of the distribution of my 
little worldly goods. I should have liked to ex- 
press some wishes as to the latter, but felt unequal 
to the physical effort. In fact, I thought of 
myself exactly as I might have thought of any 
one else, but without tenderness or self-pity. 
There was no sense of regret, no feeling of repent- 
ance. I neither wished that anything had been 
otherwise, nor did I hope for life, though I cer- 
tainly desired to live, and was anxious to do 
anything that I could to assist the ministrations 
of nurse and doctor ; but here again with the 
same spectatorial view, as though I were assisting 
at the death-bed of another. vSometimes I slept, 
sometimes I woke, and always returned to a per- 
fect consciousness of my position. Very gradually 
I became aware that I was coming back to 
life, but still without any sense of pleasure or 



The Gate of Death 49 

gratitude, yet with a sort of detached and 
pathological interest in my own symptoms. 

Not till the third day, after a long sleep, did 
I become fully aware that again I had stood at 
the very gate of death, and again returned. 
Then I became aware of an intense craving for 
life. The thought came to me, in all its intensity, 
that the quality of any suffering, however acute, 
is deeply affected by the thought that one will 
still open one's eyes upon the world. A man 
who is to undergo a dangerous operation, and is 
aware of its danger, has still the hope that he will 
return in consciousness to the familar scene, but 
with the imminent prospect of death before one's 
eyes, one is brought face to face with the ultimate 
fact that all the familar thoughts and activities 
are at an end ; there is no hope of any resumption 
of customary things, and no appeal possible. 
The well-known books, the rooms, the scenes one 
knows and loves, the dear faces, one has done 
with them all ; and instead one has to face the 
prospect, perhaps of annihilation, perhaps of a 
sleep, perhaps of a new existence to be lived under 



50 The Gate of Death 

wholly inconceivable conditions. What really 
appals the mind, what came upon me with a force 
that I had never contemplated, was the terrible 
loneliness and isolation of it all. Here, in this 
world, one can always resort, however much 
alone one is, to familar books and thoughts; one 
can turn to nature ; one can call another human 
being to one's assistance ; but the thought came 
home to me in those hours how little fit one is for 
loneliness, and how little of one's thought is given 
to anything but the well-known material sur- 
roundings of the world in which we move. From 
dawn to night one lives in these customary things, 
one is wholly occupied in them ; even at night 
one trafficks in dreams with the same wares, re- 
arranging memory and reminiscence to suit one's 
fantastic taste. I felt how slender and faint one's 
spiritual life was ; how dreamful and vague one's 
speculations were ; how wholly imaginary and 
inconclusive. Was it possible, I wondered, was 
it advisable, to live more in the things of the 
spirit ? It seemed to me that it was not possible, 
not advisable ; if the region of the spirit were a 



The Gate of Death 5 1 

definite one, full of unquestioned facts and definite 
laws ; if one arrived by speculation any nearer to 
one's conception of God and of the soul, if man 
after man succeeded in making discoveries about 
the life of the spirit which could not be gainsaid, 
it would be different ; but each mystical and 
spiritual nature treads a lonely path ; the dis- 
coveries, the certainties of one are not confirmed 
by, nay, are frequently at variance with the dis- 
coveries and certainties of another. In mystical 
reveries we are merely building an imagined 
house of our own in the gloom. The prophet of 
old saw the celestial city as a square fortress 
crowning a crag, with gemlike foundations and 
gates of pearly hue : but can we be assured for a 
moment that any such place existed out of his 
beautiful imagination ? Is it not rather clear that 
the dreaming mind was but painting its own 
fancies upon the void ? 

What I rather became aware of as I receded 
gradually, climbing back into life, from that dark 
gate, was the awful and profound mystery of it 
all. I became aware that we were meant, after 



52 The Gate of Death 

all, to live the life of the world to the uttermost, 
in the familiar scenes, among the well-known 
faces. There was a light that we might follow ; 
a faint light indeed, but which seemed to guide 
us to truth, purity, and kindness rather than to 
untruth, uncleanness, and selfishness. But how 
faint a light it was, and how our efforts 
to reach it were hampered by limitations of 
temperament, which were not wholly self- 
imposed ! 

Blank and terrible as the mystery of death 
was, it was certainly there ; and into that form- 
less gloom, with the mind fading, the conscious- 
ness dying away, we were to step. My nearness 
to death revealed to me indeed nothing of what 
was to be ; rather it revealed to me that we 
must live to the uttermost among the things 
that were given to us to use. It rebuked with 
a solemn sternness all querulousness, all anxiety. 
It told me that I was in stronger hands than my 
own ; it reminded me that it was sweet to live ; 
but it gave me no hint that might sustain or con- 
sole about what should lie beyond. 



The Gate of Death 53 

July 10. 
There was one very strange night that I spent ; 
not wholly terrible, but overhung with a solemn 
awe. I seemed to wander in dark groves, by 
glimmering paths. There appeared to be no un- 
dergrowth, for I could see the smooth boles of 
the trees shining faintly within the wood on 
either hand ; above was an impenetrable dark- 
ness of leafage. Sometimes a breeze would sigh 
for a moment upon the foliage above — sigh, and 
pass on ; but below, where I was, no breath 
moved. Sometimes the wood ended for a space, 
and I could see to right and left of me a dim 
landscape, with a brightness far down on the 
horizon, like the herald of a misty moon. The 
air above seemed cloudless, and of a deep blue 
or green ; but it was night always, and over the 
tree-tops I could now and then see a pale star 
hung in the gloom. Sometimes I could see the 
wan light of some glimmering pool or lake, shut 
in by trees, unstirred by any breath of wind. In 
places the land seemed more open and I could 
discern faint ranges of hills, whether near or far I 



54 The Gate of Death 

could not guess. Once, in the very heart of the 
wood, I came upon a huge building standing 
silent. The uncertain light showed me rows of 
dark windows, vast portals, great cornices ; round 
about I could faintly discern gardens and ter- 
races, but whether the place was deserted or 
merely wrapped in sleep I could not tell. No 
chink of light shone in any of the cavernous 
windows ; a tall tower rose high above the roofs, 
lit up with the faint radiance from the horizon. 
I was oppressed with a sense not of terror, but of 
complete loneliness. I had no sense of fatigue, 
for the air was fresh though still ; but an intense 
craving grew upon me for something that might 
break the oppressive gloom, for the rising of the 
luminary that seemed to be but just below the 
horizon, yet still to delay its coming. There 
seemed to be no living thing near me in that im- 
penetrable wood. Once I came to a bridge, 
under which flowed silently a brimming river ; 
to left and right I could see it glimmer among 
the trees. The sight of the bridge gave me a 
hope that I might find some habitation, where I 



The Gate of Death 55 

could ask for shelter, or at least learn something 
of the strange country where I found myself; 
but the track, which was all grass-grown, and 
bore no signs of wheel or foot, plunged again into 
the forest, and it appeared as though I had no 
choice but to go forward. At last, and for the 
first time, I seemed to become aware of some liv- 
ing thing in the forest besides myself. I did not 
know what it was, nor how the sense of a pres- 
ence was communicated to me, but it was as 
though something, I knew not what, were draw- 
ing near in the darkness of the wood, as though 
it were approaching upon a track which would at 
last converge upon my own. At last my path 
brought me out into an open space in the 
wood, where several roads seemed to meet. In the 
centre of the space stood a tall stone pillar, like a 
gate-post with a heavy top, inclining slightly to 
one side, emerging from bushes that grew round 
its foot. Here I halted for a moment, and then 
walked slowly round the space, peering down 
each of the shadowy avenues that led out of the 
clearing. Up one of them came a slow troop of 



56 The Gate of Death 

veiled forms ; in the midst, borne shoulder-high, 
and covered with a black pall, was a motionless 
figure. I could see under the pall, outlined by 
its velvet folds, the head, the body, and the 
stiffened feet. The procession passed close by 
me ; I dared not interrupt the solemn pomp, 
though I stood clear of the wood, hoping that I 
might receive a word or sign. But the figures 
went slowly past, their eyes bent upon the ground, 
apparently unconscious of my presence ; then 
with a sudden flash of perception I realised that 
it was my own dead form that was being borne 
past, and that I was myself a spirit. That 
thought gave me little concern — my one desire 
was to make my presence known ; but when the 
dark procession passed me by in silence, and 
entered with slow and measured steps another of 
the dark avenues, while I stood there unnoticed 
and unheeded, then a deep tide of sadness flowed 
in upon my spirit, and I knew that I was dead 
indeed. 

July 12 and 13. 

Ever since my double experience of the 



The Gate of Death 57 

proximity of death I have been trying, as 
sincerely as I can, to ascertain what I really 
do believe about a future existence ; not 
what I hope, or think, or imagine, but 
what I believe. But as half the confusion of 
thought with which arguments are generally 
conducted arises from the fact that the disputants 
attach different meanings to words, I think I had 
better define what I mean by " believe.' ' I do 
not mean "know." Knowledge is the state of 
mind which results from having all the data ; 
while belief is the state of mind which results 
from having a certain number of data, enough to 
form a theory as to what the missing data are, 
though without any absolute certainty. To take 
a simple illustration. If I am on a straight road, 
which runs up to a low height in front of me, 
and disappears ; and if at the same time I see a 
road running up a higher range behind, which 
appears to be the continuation of the road which 
I am treading, I believe, and am justified in act- 
ing upon the belief, that it is the same road as 
that which I am upon, although the intervening 



58 The Gate of Death 

section of it is hidden from my eyes. If I miss 
an overcoat from my hall, and the following day 
meet a friend who had been dining with me a 
day or two before, wearing an overcoat of the 
same pattern and make as my missing garment, 
my belief that it is mine justifies me in asking 
him whether he has not taken mine by mistake, 
though it is not impossible that he may have one 
of the same character. This is what is called cir- 
cumstantial evidence, and, if it is strong enough, 
it justifies one's acting upon it as a practical cer- 
tainty, even though one deduces certain of the 
data from the data which one possesses. Belief, 
then, in my mind, is the species of certainty 
which results from having some amount of evi- 
dence, all of which is consistent with the theory 
which I consider that I am justified in believing. 
Suppose that I have a strong intuition of the 
truth of a thing which I very much desire to be- 
lieve, I tend to believe it, if I have only a very 
little evidence to justify me in believing it. If a 
man, for instance, is very much in love, he is apt 
to believe that his feeling is reciprocated by the 



The Gate of Death 59 

object of his affections, upon slight indications 
which, if he were not in love, he would never 
think of accepting as evidence for the existence 
of a passionate attraction towards himself in 
another. 

Now I admit that the whole human race has 
a deep-seated and instinctive intuition of the con- 
tinuance of identity after death. The question is 
whether there is anything that can be called 
scientific evidence in favour of that belief. The 
intuition may simply be the result of a failure of 
imagination, because as one's own existence is 
almost the only thing of which one is absolutely 
certain, it requires a very strong effort of the 
imagination, an effort quite outside the power of 
an ordinary mind, to conceive of oneself as non- 
existent. Next to one's own existence, we are as 
certain as we can be of anything, of the existence of 
the solid earth on which we move, and the effort 
of imagination required to conceive of matter as 
non-existent is an almost impossible one. We 
can conceive of it as invisible, as dispersed in 
vapour, as distributed throughout space, but we 



60 The Gate of Death 

cannot conceive of it as absolutely annihilated ; 
and yet if we believe in the omnipotence of God, 
we believe, or at all events think we believe, 
in His power of annihilating matter, just as we 
believe that there was a time before it existed. 

I was talking the other day to an old friend, a 
clergyman of deep devotedness and considerable 
intellectual power, and I asked him to tell me 
frankly what he believed of the future life. He 
replied that he had no conception of what 
followed upon death, but that he believed that 
one would be ultimately restored to a species of 
consciousness ; during which time one would 
become aware with an infinite remorse of one's 
sins, failures and shortcomings ; and, this purging 
process accomplished, that we should be absorbed 
in the contemplation of the perfection of God. 
I agreed that this was a beautiful, a noble and a 
sustaining thought, but I said that I would ask 
him what evidence he had for the belief. He 
said that he based it upon the universal intuition 
of the human soul, and that the Christian reve- 
lation assured him of the truth of it. He said 



The Gate of Death 61 

that of course there was an infinite variety of 
intuition on the subject, and that though human 
beings of different nationalities and creeds had 
defined the course and nature of the future life 
in various ways, yet there remained the fixed 
conviction, common to all humanity, of the 
continued existence of the soul. " Believing as 
I do," he continued, "in the truth of the 
Christian revelation, I hold that the future 
existence of the soul follows the course which 
I have described, although I do not pretend to 
define the exact details/ ' 

This faith is, with modifications, what I 
suppose the majority of believing Christians 
hold ; but what does not satisfy me in it is the 
absence of any definite evidence of the fact. 
Such a belief seems to me nothing more than 
the confirming of one intuition by another, 
because the belief in the Christian revelation is 
of itself of the nature of an intuition. The 
theory, indeed, 'of an omnipotent and perfectly 
benevolent God is not wholly confirmed by the 
phenomena of the world ; indeed, the belief in a 



62 The Gate of Death 

future existence is of itself of the nature of a 
deduction, drawn in trie face of facts which seem 
to suggest the contrary, from the assumption 
that the Creator of the world is both omnipotent 
and perfectly benevolent. 

What then, to be frank, do I believe ? Well, 
it seems to me that just as I cannot conceive of 
the annihilation of existing matter, neither can I 
conceive of the annihilation of what I call vital 
force and consciousness. The life that animates 
matter is to my mind fully as real and actual 
as matter itself. As to consciousness, that is 
a different question, because life can certainly 
exist, as in the case of a person stunned by a 
blow, when consciousness does not exist, or when 
at all events the memory of consciousness does 
not exist afterwards. It may be that conscious- 
ness is dependent upon the union of life and 
matter ; but I believe with all my heart in the 
indestructibility of life, and I thus believe that 
when I die, when my body moulders into dust, 
the life that animated it is as much in existence 
as it was before. Further than this I dare not 



The Gate of Death 63 

go, because all the evidence that there is seems 
to point to a suspension of consciousness after 
death. How that vital force may be employed 
I cannot guess. It may sink back into a central 
reservoir of life, just as the particles of my body 
will be distributed among both animate and 
inanimate matter when I have ceased to be. It 
may be that the vital force which I call myself 
may be distributed again among other lives ; it 
may be that it is a definite and limited thing, 
a separate cell or centre ; and thus it may here- 
after animate another body — such things are not 
incredible. But in any case it is all in the hands 
of God ; and though I may desire that I knew 
more definitely what the secret is, it is clear to 
me that I am not intended to know ; and it is 
clear to me, too, that all who have professed to 
know, or to assure us of the truth of theories, 
are either building upon their own imaginations 
or upon the imaginations of others, and that none 
of the theories that we so passionately desire to 
believe belong to the region of even practical 
certainties. 



64 The Gate of Death 

What effect this belief, or this suspension of 
belief, may have upon life and action it is diffi- 
cult to trace ; but though I would, if indeed I 
could, hold otherwise, though I would that I 
could more definitely formulate my faith in the 
future life, my reason forbids me. It is not that 
my instinct and intuition do not alike embrace 
the hope of the preservation of my own identity. 
If there were any trace, however minute, of 
rational and scientific evidence on the subject, it 
would justify me in making a deduction. Such 
evidence may in the future be forthcoming ; but 
I can only reluctantly say that I do not think 
that it is forthcoming either in the past or in 
the present. 

July 14. 

One must not build too much upon the fact 
th^t the instinct of after-existence seems so deeply 
rooted in the heart ; it may be nothing more than 
a condition of our present being, for are we not 
surrounded by similar illusions every day ? 

One travels in the brightly -lighted compart- 
ment of a train ; as the day darkens outside, we 



The Gate of Death . 65 

see, reflected in the window-pane, a picture of the 
compartment, outlined on the side of the dark 
cuttings through which the train runs, on the 
sombre trees and hedges. We see the passengers 
sit in that visionary place ; we see the cushions of 
the carriage, the luggage in the racks, the quiet 
lamp burning. Our senses tell us unmistakably 
that it is there outside the window, speeding with 
us ; and yet we know it to be a mere illusion, 
that it is an inherent property of matter to reflect 
and to reverse a picture of all that falls within its 
surface. Those who argue that because the in- 
stinct of after-existence is implanted in us, there- 
fore it must be there, may be like a pertinacious 
child who would maintain that because he had 
ocular evidence of the existence of that phantom 
compartment outside the window, it must be 
there if he could but find it. Indeed, the child 
has better evidence for the existence of the 
mirrored place, because at all events he sees it, 
than we have for the continuance of our existence 
after death, of which there is no scientific evidence 

at all. 

5 



66 The Gate of Death 

One must not, of course, treat a metaphor, a 
parable, as an argument. But the illusion of the 
mirror is an illusion that we can all test, and find 
to be an illusion ; yet the illusion is constant and 
universal. May not the other be an illusion too, 
inseparable from our present conditions ? Alas, 
it may be so. 

July 15. 

These thoughts of death, of God, of life, are 
terrible, inextricable. They buzz round me like 
busy flies round some helpless creature too weak 
even to resist. The darkness becomes more dense 
and impenetrable. 

A book which I have been reading says com- 
placently that life is a probation, and that this 
explains everything ; but it does not explain a 
thousand things. The theory would be that a 
man goes on in his pride, and God suddenly 
strikes him down and says, " There, make the 
best of it ; show yourself to be a man." Dizzied, 
bewildered, repressing his groans, the victim lies 
till he recovers his strength to struggle on a little 
further, and God smites him down again. 



The Gate of Death 67 

The punishment does not come, the curative 
punishment, at the right time to some ; it comes 
too late, when men are paralysed by habit. Some 
go on still in their wickedness, and the punish- 
ment never comes at all. It does not fall on the 
right person ; innocence and carelessness are 
punished more severely than cautious and de- 
liberate wickedness. Besides, if it is a probation, 
God is on both sides in the fight. He permits 
the temptation, and we are told we must be grate- 
ful to God if He also sends strength to resist — 
what if He does not send strength to resist? 
Some, owing to a happy disposition, pass through 
life in loving-kindness, rectitude, unselfishness, 
compassion, brightness. We call such people the 
hope of the race ; but to some such a life is im- 
possible, by reason of inherited tendency. Yet no 
one can dare to say that the world w 7 ould be the 
worse for more of these fine and beautiful natures ; 
indeed, it is our deepest and dearest hope that the 
number of these elect spirits should increase as the 
world goes on ; why should God not swiftly in- 
crease them ? Then we are reduced to assuming 



68 The Gate of Death 

that there must be a new life to redress the balance 
of the old, because if there were not another life 
the inequalities, the injustices of this life, would 
be intolerable. If life is indeed a probation, then 
we ought to esteem those happiest who are 
tempted most and who suffer most. But we do 
not do this ; we speak and think of suffering as 
the shadow of sin. If our faith were real and 
vital, we should rejoice with our friends when 
they suffer and are punished ; when we saw them 
prosperous, happy, untroubled, we should be 
overcome with anxiety and doubt. We, too, try 
to be on both sides of the battle, and thus we 
fight half-heartedly, not knowing what I/)rd we 
obey. 

July 16 and 17. 
The theory that life is a probation is a difficult 
one to maintain in the presence of the immense 
number of deaths of children of tender years that 
takes place in this strangely constructed world of 
ours. I do not know what the figures are, but I 
suppose that more human beings die in the first 
two or three years of their existence than die at 






The Gate of Death 69 

any other age. If, then, we constructed our idea 
of the normal type of humanity by a strict con- 
sideration of averages, we should conclude that 
the normal life of humanity was intended to be 
only a year or two in duration, and that life was 
in some cases abnormally prolonged ; and yet it 
is just the other way. We are agreed that the 
normal life of the perfectly healthy individual, 
who escapes the accidents that may threaten life, 
is seventy years or upwards ; and yet only a very 
small minority of the human race attain to it. 

Now if we saw that all human beings did attain 
to maturity of thought and power, we might then 
be justified in holding that we were all intended 
to be confronted with a certain quantity of ex- 
perience, and that it was designed for the per- 
fecting of character. But when we realise that 
thousands of human beings die every year without 
attaining even to intellectual consciousness at all, 
and that thousands more die before they have 
reached an age where a human being may begin 
to be guided by principle rather than by instinct, 
the theory of probation must surely fall to the 



70 The Gate of Death 

ground. If life is intended to develop character, 
so as to fit us in some way or other for a future 
life, then what is the purpose which underlies 
the deaths of millions of the human race before 
experience has even begun to have any form- 
ative effect at all on character? If we really 
believe in the theory of the probation of life, we 
are almost bound to believe, as a corollary, in the 
Oriental doctrine of metempsychosis — namely, 
that each individual personality has a succession 
of lives before it ; and even then what explanation 
is forthcoming of the lives that just open for a few 
hours or days upon the world, and close again, 
leaving, too, behind them, alas ! a passionate 
sorrow in the hearts of bereaved parents ? 

If our powers of reason do indeed differentiate 
us from the animal creation, then why are we 
subjected to the same inexplicable law that pro- 
duces such millions of lives, and yet brings so 
few to maturity ? 

If we follow up the question in the light of 
pure reason, we should naturally conclude that 
there were two laws at work — a law of vast crea- 



The Gate of Death 7 1 

tive energy, doing its best to develop lives under 
certain definite laws ; and, working across this, 
a second law, not indeed quite so strong as the 
creative law, but terribly strong, which was do- 
ing its best to suppress the creative energy and 
render it vain. That is the obvious deduction of 
pure reason. And yet there is a profound intui- 
tion which seems to draw us to believe in a unity 
of law ; and then we seem to perceive that the 
only way in which life can be maintained is 
through the sacrifice of other life. If we found 
that the law of creative energy produced lives 
precisely calculated with regard to the sustaining 
qualities of the earth, so that no life need infringe 
on another life, so that there was room for all 
and sustenance for all, then we should not need 
to doubt the unity of law. But life, when we 
leave the vegetable world, seems to be incapable 
of sustaining itself without preying upon other 
lives ; and in the vegetable world itself, which 
can draw sustenance out of what we believe to be 
inanimate elements, such as water and air, the 
unity seems to be nullified by the fact that the 



72 The Gate of Death 

production of vegetable forms takes place without 
reference to the room which each vegetable re- 
quires for its existence. I mean that in a tropical 
forest many seeds cannot come to maturity be- 
cause of the pressure on the space exerted by the 
wasteful and prodigal excess of seed-production. 
Generation then seems to take place quite with- 
out any calculated reference to the resources of 
the earth to sustain the life generated. 

There results from this a terrible sense of the 
extreme precariousness of our lives, surrounded 
as we are by secret foes and hostile influences 
which may at any moment overthrow us. What- 
ever precautions we take, we can only slightly 
modify the risks that environ us. 

No system of religion, no hardly- won code of 
morals, gives, or attempts to give, the slightest 
explanation of these appalling facts ; indeed, the 
horror of the situation lies, not so much in the 
facts, as in the terrible consciousness of them 
which is given us. Indeed, the very terror seems 
sent us that we may have a desperate desire for 
continued existence — so desperate, indeed, that 



The Gate of Death 73 

we have no instinctive reluctance to sacrificing 
other lives, weaker than our own, that we may 
continue to preserve our own existence. 

And then, too, there is the grievous mystery 
that we can survey the design of God from 
without, and even feel a sad persuasion that we 
could arrange it better if we had the power. As 
though — I do not say it irreverently — God had 
hardly the time to attend to all the innumerable 
enterprises which He initiates. 

Rest and tranquillity are denied us by the very 
nature of the case ; the very instincts that so 
tyrannously beset us, indeed, often contain within 
themselves the seed of death, if they are pursued 
blindly. 

It is, alas, a terrible and inextricable net in 
which we lie entangled ; the sport of monstrous 
forces which seem at once to menace us with 
death, and to implant in us the deepest reluc- 
tance to experience it. 

Yet we can arrive at no certain hope unless 
we resolutely face these facts. And what is the 
strangest thing of all, the more we know, the 



74 The Gate of Death 

more we explore the causes of things, the more 
impenetrable does the mystery become. 

July 18. 

I suppose that philosophers and religious 
teachers would alike say to one who 'is engaged 
as I am, however fitfully and ignorantly, in en- 
deavouring to track truth to its lair, that I must 
pursue it with a wider view, a more extensive 
grasp. But this is just what I cannot do. I am 
not pursuing truth in the spirit of a statistician 
or a philosopher ; I am rather dogged and pur- 
sued myself by a question I cannot answer, a 
doubt that I cannot resolve. The impossibility 
of taking a wider view is caused by the fact that 
one can never know perfectly the conditions of 
any other life beside one's own. There are things 
in every life about which the persons concerned 
will not and, indeed, cannot speak. However 
frankly and candidly a man told the thoughts of 
his heart, it would be practically impossible for 
him to do so without a bias or an aim. Very 
few people, indeed, have even the skill to do it; 



The Gate of Death 75 

for to make a candid confession of one's thoughts 
demands a considerable skill of expression ; and 
it means, too, a power of putting into precise 
words vague and indefinite ideas, which is the 
hardest thing in the world even for one who is 
a practised writer ; and thus, condemned as we 
are to silence, it may be said that it is impos- 
sible for us ever to look at life exactly from the 
point of view of another. It is hard, indeed, to 
look at it fairly and without prejudice even in 
our own case, because of our tendency not so 
much to excuse ourselves, as to make out a 
slightly more favourable, more interesting, more 
romantic case than is justified by the facts. 

If, then, we can only survey the problem fully 
and fairly from our own point of view, our only 
chance is to correct our beliefs by our own ex- 
perience. Iyooking back upon my own life, I 
will say frankly that I have been very tenderly 
and lovingly used by God. He put me into a 
place in the world in which my faculties could 
have freer play than in any situation that I could 
myself have designed. He made me sensitive both 



76 The Gate of Death 

to pain and joy ; He has sent me very little pain, 
and abundance of joy. I have never been con- 
sciously tempted beyond my power of resistance, 
because, though I have not always resisted tempta- 
tion, there was no reason, outside of my own wilful 
heart, why I should not have resisted it. Such 
dark and sad experienceas I have had in my life 
has invariably ended by ministering to my happi- 
ness. God has enabled me to effect far more than 
I could have hoped, or ever did hope to effect, 
by putting me in circumstances which gave me 
the very opportunity of using the powers He 
endued me with. He has sent me all the things 
which I desired, and with the added blessing of 
having to earn them. If I have ever desired a 
thing, and failed to gain it, I have always been 
faithfully and "gently shown that it would not 
have brought me happiness, and that I only de- 
sired it because I did not really know what it 
entailed, but judged it by a superficial view. 

And thus I see that, for myself at least, my 
life has been ordered not only on wise and 
gracious lines, but with a singular adaptation 



The Gate of Death 77 

to all my faculties, desires, and wishes. What- 
ever I have had to bear, and it has been little 
enough, has never been intolerable. Again and 
again, when I have thought myself confronted 
with some complex and seemingly disastrous 
situation, the path has been strangely smoothed 
at the very moment it has been required, and 
not before. It is indeed true that, when I look 
round the world, I see inexplicable tragedies, 
hopeless sufferings, miserable lives. I see, or 
seem to see, tender and innocent creatures, in- 
volved, through no fault of their own, in disasters 
of which I cannot see the justice. I see characters, 
hampered from the first by unhappy weakness, 
plunged deeper into degradation. But I reflect 
that I cannot see these lives from the inside ; 
and, further, that I only see them at a point in 
their development, with the future as yet un- 
veiled. There have been times, indeed, in my 
own life, when I have felt that, if I could have 
had the choice, I never would have been born, 
and that no amount of joy could ever com- 
pensate for the suffering of which I was made 



78 The Gate of Death 

involuntarily the victim. But hitherto I can 
only frankly say that all has been made plain. 
I can cry, like the old Psalmist, " Oh, come hither 
and hearken, all ye that fear God, and I will tell you 
what He hath done for my soul." 

And then, too, how rare it is to find even 
those who are most hopelessly afflicted blaming 
God for their affliction. How pathetically patient 
men are ! How they tend, as a rule, to feel that 
they have deserved their sufferings ! How hope- 
fully they turn to whatever consolations are left, 
and bless God for them ! How seldom does one 
hear people say, "The sin was not my own fault ; 
and if I had my life to live again, I could not, 
even if I would, live otherwise ! ' ' How much 
more compassionate people are, as a rule, of 
others than of themselves ! 

Thus we are not left without light in the 
world ; even in our own dulled and clouded hearts, 
when the radiance of God beats upon them, we 
see sometimes an answering gleam within, like ' 
the secret fire that sleeps in the uncut gem. 
Our work should be to clear the surface of 



The Gate of Death 79 

the dim irregularities that break and blur the 
radiance. May not the work of life upon the 
soul be like the graving and polishing of some 
rough gem, till, when the rough and dinted 
husk is worn away, the stone that seemed so 
cloudy, so minute, so shallow, holds within it a 
pure and lucid well of tinted light ? 

July 19. 

I have been reading the Psalms to-day. The 
Eighty-eighth Psalm is the saddest in the Psalter, 
because it is the only one, I think, which is a cry 
from a burdened heart from beginning to end. 
The mood never changes, the cloud never lifts ; it 
ends on a sad note, the note of desolation, the 
unutterable loneliness that sorrow brings, "My 
lovers and friends hast Thou put away from me ; 
and hid mine acquaintance out of my sight." Is 
there any poetry in the world that speaks so 
tenderly and simply of the sorrow of the heart as 
some of these psalms ? Their beauty lies in the fact 
that they are the work of a man or of men, who 
just entered, with a transparent sincerity, without 



80 The Gate of Death 

(it seems) any desire for literary effect, into the 
deepest secrets of the heart ; one never feels the 
hand of the artist ; there seems to be no attempt 
to heighten the mood, to darken the shadows. 

There is only a perfect dignity and a perfect 
directness. Neither is there any sense of specta- 
torial effect, any egotism, any self-pity ; it seems 
not the voice of a man, but the voice of humanity, 
the cry of patient sorrow that is heard. It is 
this very fact that the psalms are in a sense so im- 
personal that gives them their wonderful power 
over the soul ; one does not seem, in reading 
them, to be listening to the querulous complaints 
of a fellow-man ; they rather seem to draw into 
themselves all the strains of sorrow, all the 
streams of human tears, all the sense of desertion 
and loneliness that sorrow brings. 

In this one psalm alone, as I have said, there 
is no single ray of light or hope ; most of them 
are written in a mood of recollected sorrow, of 
sorrow seen in retrospect from a calm haven. 

" 1 waited patiently for the Lord, and He in- 
clined unto me and heard my calling." That, 



The Gate of Death 81 

alas, is the weakness of human consolation, that 
it depends upon hope ; what of those to whom 
He does not incline, whose darkening life is 
going down to the grave, through slow grada- 
tions, inevitably foreseen, of suffering and decay ? 
Consider the book of Job, the book which faces 
the darkest problems with the supremest courage 
and patience. The essence of it is that Job is re- 
stored to all his prosperity and happiness. The 
weakness of it lies in the assumption that the 
strong sons and daughters who were born to him 
after he had emerged from his miseries, could 
make up for those whom he had lost. It is an 
almost childlike ending, because it seems as 
though it appeared to the author that all the 
recollection of the brave and joyful children 
whom Job had lost by such sudden and unex- 
pected strokes of calamity, the thought of their 
childish days, of all their vanished love and 
brightness, could cast no shadow over the mind 
of the patient patriarch. 
And in the psalms, too, the essence of the 

situation is that the light and joy should be 
6 






82 The Gate of Death 

restored. What one craves for is something 
that should bring consolation and strength, and 
even joy, in the face of irreparable calamity, in 
the presence of a hopeless fear. The writers of 
these psalms did not draw their comfort from the 
thought of a future life ; they are comforted be- 
cause they are brought out of the mire, because 
their feet are set again upon the rock, because 
the gladness of life is restored. Is it possible to 
find consolation face to face with the fact that 
the gladness of life, that strength and health will 
not be^restored ? 

In some of these psalms the writers seem to 
take comfort from the sense of national great- 
ness, from the memory of the wonders that God 
has wrought for His chosen people. 

"And thou continuest holy ; O thou worship of 
Israel. Our fathers hoped in thee ; they trusted in 
thee and thou didst deliver them" 

It is the thought of the possible deliverance 
that makes the burden tolerable. 

What I desire to find and cannot, is something 
that would sustain when no deliverance is pos- 



The Gate of Death 83 

sible. Not a stoical courage, not a mere passive 
endurance ; but something which made martyrs 
of old go to their death with songs upon their 
lips. Suppose that we cannot claim for ourselves 
the precise and definite hopes that they claimed ; 
suppose that we cannot believe in our imme- 
diate translation to a land of hope and light, 
with companies of happy saints to welcome us, 
with pure and perfect joy waiting to receive us, 
what then ? 

Is it possible to rest upon a passionate desire 
that the will of God should be fulfilled, to take 
every pain and every fear as a direct gift from 
His hand ? Only in that direction is any hope 
possible ; and yet how many of us are capable 
of that ? how many of us have even a chance of 
learning how to be capable of it ? Answering for 
myself, I am not capable of it, and I see no rea- 
son to believe that with my fitful energy, my 
sensitiveness to pain, my swift abandonment to 
despair, I can ever in my life learn it. What I 
need is the honey out of the strong rock to com- 
fort me, sweetness from an unexpected quarter, 



84 The Gate of Death 

out of the stern face of the crag ; sweet refresh- 
ment stored where all seemed dark and hard. I 
have seen death face to face ; and what was given 
me was indifference, apathy, a passive courage, 
that came not from realising the worst, but from 
an inability to realise it. Yet, after all, one needs 
not to dispute the goodness of God, to quarrel 
with the quality of the strength given one, if 
only the strength is given. But I dare not say 
that I felt that God was with me ; He was there, 
He was over me; but I walked through the 
valley, not like "a bold man facing the end, but 
like a child in a dark tunnel, clasping a mother's 
arm, his face hidden on her shoulder ; secure, 
and only wondering that I was not more afraid. 

Perhaps one desires too much — one desires to 
be strong, to be independent, to be bold ; and one 
has to learn one's utter weakness. Perhaps the 
secret lies there. 

July 21, 22. 

I have for a long time back, for some years in- 
deed, been much pre-occupied with thoughts of 



The Gate of Death 85 

death. Some might call it a morbid pre-occupa- 
tion, but it has not been that. It is morbid if 
one dwells on the material side of death, pictures 
the sad incidents of mortality, sees the stiffened 
image with blurred and filmy eyes, the waxen 
pallor, the faint smile ; but I have never dwelt on 
these things ; it has been with me a preoccupa- 
tion as to what the meaning of it all is, what 
prospect of hope lies behind the unmanning sense 
of finality. 

I have read books on the subject, meditations, 
scientific treatises, and so-called philosophical 
consolations. But now that I have been close to 
it, all these books seem to me unutterably false 
and vain. They do not approach the real ex- 
perience at all. They seem to have been com- 
posed by comfortable people sitting in armchairs 
and trying to fancy what death would be like ; 
but it is like nothing in the world, different, not 
in degree, but in kind, from any imagination 
that any one can form. I suppose that different 
people have different experiences ; but the hol- 
lowest and emptiest of all the things written on 



86 The Gate of Death 

the subject seem to me to be the consolations 
suggested. For instance, it is said in religious 
books that the memory of a virtuous life brings 
peace, the memory of an ill-spent life brings 
agony. If there is any shadow of truth in that, 
it resides in the fact, I believe, that people of 
virtuous and temperate lives are generally people 
of well-balanced and tranquil temperaments, not 
as a rule imaginative or passionate or desirous ; 
such people would be likely to meet death as 
simply and quietly as they had met life ; but on 
the other hand, people who have yielded freely 
to temptation, who have gratified sensual im- 
pulse, are generally people of unbalanced, eager, 
impatient temperaments, greedy of joy, subject to 
terror, imaginative, highly-strung, restless, fan- 
ciful. To such as these death would perhaps be 
full of fears. But it is sensitiveness and imagina- 
tiveness that make, I believe, the difference, and 
not the thought of sins and failures. The greatest 
saint in the world, if of a self-reproachful tem- 
perament, would be likely to have abundance of 
failures to recall, a deep sense of opportunities 



The Gate of Death 87 

missed, a passionate remorse for wasted hours ; 
while on the other hand a strong, coarse, bestial 
nature would probably face death with a surly 
indifference. 

But my own experience is that one hardly 
thinks of the past at all, that the imagination is 
dulled and the senses concentrated upon the ebb- 
ing life. I disliked the discomfort I felt, more 
than I dreaded the thought of death ; and I was 
simply not strong enough to reflect at all. 

As to other consolations, they are no less fanci- 
ful ; for the fact is that one craves for no conso- 
lation at all. One writer whom I read, I think it 
was a I^atin philosopher, says that the thought 
of the universality of the law of death is in itself 
a comfort. As Hamlet says, " Thou know'st 't is 
common." The thought that all men who have 
ever lived have had to pass through the gate, 
that all will some day pass through it, must, the 
writer avers, have an effect in alleviating the 
horror of death. Well, I can say candidly that 
such a thought never even dimly entered my 
mind. The loneliness of the experience is so 



88 The Gate of Death 

great, the isolation so complete, that one does not 
think, at least I did not, of others in connection 
with it at all. My feeling was that the experi- 
ence was so strange that I could not fancy that 
any one had ever experienced it before ; it ap- 
peared absolutely unique and personal. 

No, these consolations, these sustaining 
thoughts may be indulged in when one is alive 
and well ; but when one is dying, it seems as if 
nothing that one had ever thought, or that any 
one had ever thought, had any bearing upon the 
vast fact. The fact indeed is so vast that one is 
absorbed in contemplation of it ; it takes one in a 
sense out of oneself, though it leaves the identity 
as the one exisiting thing in the world. I can- 
not describe it ; the thought cannot be recap- 
tured, cannot be told in words, because it is so 
surprising, so new, so unlike anything in the 
world. I do not think that any one has ever 
before tried to describe it ; at least I cannot recol- 
lect that I have ever read anything which in the 
least prepared me for it. I suppose that few peo- 
ple have ever been so near death, with perfect 



The Gate of Death 89 

consciousness and lucidity of mind, as I have, 
without dying ; or if they have, they feel as I do, 
that it is of little use to attempt to describe the 
indescribable. 

Suppose that one day, walking along a familiar 
road, and turning a corner, one found that, 
instead of the well-known scene which one had 
expected, an enormous chasm had opened in the 
ground ; that one could see its precipitous sides, 
huge broken ledges and seams of rock, the edges 
fringed with twisted tree roots ; that one could 
gaze into the depths and see at an unimaginable 
distance a gleam of fire and smoke, and that 
strange, remote, and awful sounds, like falling 
rocks, bursting reservoirs, splintering crags came 
faintly up. One would not at first think of what 
had become of the fields and houses that one 
knew, one would not even wonder what the cause 
of this frightful convulsion was ; one would sim- 
ply be absorbed in gazing, and probably the 
emotion would be in a way almost pleasurable. 

Well, death is like that ! It is a sudden unac- 
countable disruption and suspension of familiar 



90 The Gate of Death 

life. One seems brought into contact with some- 
thing infinitely great, ancient, remote, marvellous; 
it obliterates all familiar trains of thought, habits, 
and ideas. They are all swallowed up in its vast- 
ness. And thus — at least this is my experience — 
one has no time to think of repentance, or conso- 
lation, or courage. One does not desire any of 
these things, not because one does not need 
them, but simply because one does not recollect 
them. Everything is swallowed up in awe, won- 
der, and mystery. Yet, as I have said, it is not 
a painful thought ; it has something that is 
pleasurable about it, though I cannot say where 
the pleasure lies— it is the pleasure perhaps of 
feeling one's self in contact with a tremendous 
experience, an adventure beside which all the 
discoveries of explorers, all the dreams of poets, 
all the tales of travellers, all the glories of the 
world sink into paltry insignificance. When 
Yasco de Balboa saw the Pacific from Darien, 
he thought little of his troubles, his wanderings, 
his dangers, the glory that was to come to him. 
The thing was there, that prodigious rolling 



The Gate of Death 91 

ocean ; and for a moment he was content simply 
to gaze ; thus in death one is brought suddenly 
face to face with the tideless ocean, and every- 
thing else in the world fades away at the sight. 

It is afterwards that one reflects and meditates, 
thinks what one ought to have felt ; but at the 
time there is nothing but an awe-struck, an 
absorbed contemplation. 

July 24. 

How strangely blind and unobservant we are 
about the real and wonderful blessings of our 
life ; we are scarcely grateful for them ; we 
scarcely know that they are there until we lose 
them. 

If you go down the old North Road from 
Huntingdon to Royston, soon after passing 
Wimpole, that elm-embowered village, a little 
road turns off to Shingay, which is one of those 
odd and rare things, a name on the map without 
a place to correspond to it. If you turn down 
the road, a little farther on, you pass the Vicar- 
age of Wendy, a low plastered house prettily 



92 The Gate of Death 

embowered in trees; to the right of the gate, 
visible and audible from the road, in a shrubbery, 
there is a fountain, with a pipe perhaps six feet 
high, that spills itself day and night, with a 
pleasant tinkling, into a wide mossy basin, and 
runs away in a little stream. The country all 
round is perfectly flat, pleasant green water 
meadows intersected by many streams, to be 
known lower down, where they unite, as the 
Cam. I had often been by this road, and the 
fountain was well known to me by sight; but 
beyond thinking that the place was very well 
supplied with water, I had never reflected that 
it was strange that water, obviously at high 
pressure, should thus gush out high above the 
ground, day and night, in a flat country; but 
beyond thinking that it was rather a wasteful 
business for a country vicar to have a great foun- 
tain running day and night in his shrubbery, 
and the water gushing to waste by the roadside, 
I had never thought about the matter, until I 
saw in a little book that this is one of the most 
extraordinary springs in the country. No one 



The Gate of Death 93 

knows whence it is fed ; probably by some cave 
reservoir among the wolds above Wimpole ; 
because the pressure in the spring is so great 
that the reservoir, wherever it is, must be at a 
considerable height, and there is no high ground 
nearer than the wolds. The road indeed owes 
its existence to the fact that it probably repre- 
sents an ancient track which passed by the 
spring. And so by some dark underground 
passage, centuries old, the sparkling chalk water 
caught upon the hills is led down into the plain, 
and made to leap high out of the ground. But 
to me it is a parable, as I said, of how dull of 
heart and mind one is to apprehend these beauti- 
ful and strange things. 

It has been always so with myself, I fear. I 
become aware now, in my long and slow confine- 
ment, of what a beautiful treasure was given me 
in the shape of health. I never valued it ; I 
hardly knew I had it. I used to feel, I think, 
about invalids, that there was a certain affectation 
about their seclusion, their abstention from ac- 
tivities. I do not think I even pitied them 



94 The Gate of Death 

very much, but thought of them as leading 
rather comfortable and indolent lives. Now, to 
be well seems to me the one thing worth having. 
I used to fret over little ailments which some- 
times caused me slight inconvenience ; but I 
never knew what it was to spend a day in bed, 
or to be conscious of any restrictions affecting 
work, or food, or exercise. It is not so much 
the restrictions that are galling ; it is the un- 
manning sense of feebleness and irritable dis- 
content that is the affliction. To read for an 
hour tires me ; to drag myself down-stairs and 
back is as much as I can manage. The worst 
of my own condition is that my mind is perfectly 
clear, and that the defect is a purely mechanical 
one. 

It is a heavy trial ; there is no use disguising 
it. I can speak and write of it now, since I have 
heard that it is merely a question, in all proba- 
bility, of time and patience. But a few months 
ago, when I felt the same feebleness day after 
day, and when I dared not look forwards, or 
hope for any improvement, it was a thing that 



The Gate of Death 95 

was simply too bad to speak about. I did not 
want sympathy : I simply wanted strength and 
health. 

I ask myself whether I can trace any benefit 
from the discipline of those weeks. Well, there 
comes a certain grim patience, I think. At first, 
the mind wearies itself with endless hopes and 
anxieties, until it is worn out ; then there comes 
a time when one learns simply not to think of 
it — to live for the day and in the day, to make 
the most of the smallest pleasures, the simplest 
distractions ; but the worst of having a heavy 
fear hanging in the background is that the ob- 
servation, the sense of beauty, becomes such 
a torture. One sees some beautiful thing, a 
flower, a flying ray, a sunset ; and just as one 
has a tiny thrill of pleasure, out of the dark 
comes the sinister hand and plucks one back. 
What is the use in taking pleasure in it, when 
you are yourself maimed and helpless, just 
drifting on through a few uneasy hours to 
death? No words can express the haunting 
dreariness of the thought. There is nothing 



96 The Gate of Death 

romantic, nothing inspiring about that dark val- 
ley, the valley of the Shadow. In The Pilgrim's 
Progress the place was full of curiosities — gins, 
for instance ( I have often wondered what a gin 
was like), and pitfalls ; there were caverns seen 
dimly through the gloom, with awful figures 
round them ; there were fiends and hobgoblins, 
such as the thing like a lion that came after the 
Pilgrim at a great padding pace. If there had 
been any of these startling accessories, the Valley 
might have been a more stimulating place than it 
proved to be for me, in spite of its terrors ; but 
there was only the blank and shapeless gloom, 
the hopeless dreariness that turned to ashes 
whatever it touched. 

Now, thank God, it is very different, because 
I see the light ahead, and the very restrictions 
to which I submit have a joyful air about them. 

But what of the poor souls around whom 
the accursed air continues to darken and to 
blacken, who are met daily, instead of hope, with 
an ever-increasing despair, a growing weakness ? 
How and where and when will God atone for this ? 



The Gate of Death 97 

And thus I return to my first thought, namely, 
how ungrateful we are for the blessings of our 
untroubled days. It comes home to me now 
what a supreme gift is the gift of unconscious 
health ; and I pray God to forgive me for hav- 
ing received from His hand so rich a treasure 
so dully, as a right, and for having used it so 
lightly. 

July 25. 

I once knew an old lady, a woman of a 
naturally bright and hopeful temperament, who 
suffered for several years from a fatal complaint, 
with frequent accesses of intolerable pain. The 
good clergyman of the place, who laboured 
much to console her, bade her think of the 
Crucifixion of Christ, and of all the agony of 
the Cross. "Yes," she said pathetically, "but 
that was so short — only a few hours. I am 
crucified day after day. ' ' 

That is not the only difficulty about the story 
of the Crucifixion. It has often seemed to me 
that if Christ by virtue of His Divine nature 
foresaw what was before Him, the peace and 



98 The Gate of Death 

glory into which He would be received in a few 
hours, the eternal benefit He was working out 
for the human race, the Crucifixion can have 
hardly appeared terrible at all. Why, even I, a 
frail and shrinking mortal, if I could be sure 
that, after a few hours of agony, I should step 
into life and light, and if at the same time I 
knew that my sufferings would bring relief to 
even my own nation, I should not hesitate to 
submit to untold tortures. And there are hu- 
man beings all over the world who, without any 
sure hope of life to come, and without any deep 
conviction to tell them that their sufferings will 
benefit a single human soul, have to bear as bad 
or worse, day by day. Either the knowledge of 
what was coming was hidden from the mind of 
Christ, — and His despairing cry that God had 
forsaken Him seems to testify to that — or else He 
had to endure a mysterious agony of which we 
have no hint ; otherwise the narrative of the 
Crucifixion hardly holds any sustaining example 
for us at all. 

And does it indeed sustain us in the worst 



The Gate of Death 99 

agony to know that others have suffered similar 
pain ? For my own part, I can only say that the 
thought has no power to sustain or console my- 
self. One is alone with one's pain, plunged in 
despairing misery. 

Thou h oldest mine eyes waking, said the sad 
Psalmist : / am so feeble that I cannot speak. I 
have considered the days of old and the years that 
are past. I call to remembrance my song, and in 
the night I commune with my own heart and 
search out my spirit. 

Will the Lord absent Himself for ever and will 
He be no more entreated f Is His mercy clean gone 
for ever ; and is His promise come tctterly to an end 
for evermore ? Hath God forgotten to be gracious ; 
and will He shut up His loving- ki?id?iess in dis- 
pleasure ? 

And I said, it is mine own infirmity ; but I will 
remember the years of the right hand of the most 
Highest. I will remember the works of the Lord, 
and call to mind the wonders of old time. I will 
think also of all thy works, and my talking shall 
be of thy doings. L OF £ 



ioo The Gate of Death 

Those are the words of a man who has tasted 
the bitterest cup of suffering ; and he found 
comfort, or tried to find comfort, in the thought 
of the history of his nation and the guiding 
hand of God. He must have been one of rare 
fortitude and noble patriotism. For myself, in 
those dark moments, the wonders of old time 
had no meaning. The question was whether 
God would show His power for me to-day. If 
I had been nobler, stronger, more generous, I 
might have thrilled in my weakness with dreams 
of famous men ; noble acts of self-surrender, 
suffering courageously borne. But I could not. 
Such thoughts were as nothing to me. I had 
not voluntarily incurred my suffering ; I had no 
hope that it would benefit another. I am here 
speaking with entire candour, holding nothing 
back, not trying to make out a good case for 
myself; and I say that in that hour of despair 
there was not a single thought either of philo- 
sophy or religion that came to my help. I lay a 
helpless victim, prostrated by the stroke of God. 
I felt as some poor woodland beast may feel 



The Gate of Death 101 

who has been struck down by a shot from a 
gun, and drags itself crying a few feet among 
the furrows, with the dog running in upon it. 
Why had I been born ? What had I done to 
merit this heavy misery ? I did not arraign 
the justice or the power of God : I only suffered. 
The only effort of which I was capable was just 
to try and conceal my grief from those who loved 
me, force myself to speak and smile, and then to 
sink back into my lonely misery again. 

July 27. 
It is very strange that, though I have twice 
faced death without fear, I cannot learn not to 
fear it. Now that I have come back to life and 
ease, and feel myself growing stronger, my im- 
agination begins to array the terrors of death 
again. I feel that I did not realise it at the 
time; I look back at myself as one might look at 
a man drifting asleep in a boat down to a dread- 
ful cataract. I begin again to picture to myself 
the horror of the dark, the isolation, the cessa- 
tion of all familiar thoughts and activities, the 
dropping of the curtain on the scenes where I 



io2 The Gate of Death 

have lived, the rooms, the houses, the fields I 
have loved. Illness and absence are only tolera- 
ble because one hopes to be restored to the world 
one knows, the old easy ways, the faces and talk 
of friends, the pleasant habits of life. I do not 
know which I dread most — the possibility of 
ceasing to be, of blank annihilation, of an end- 
less sleep, or finding myself launched alone on 
a vast shadowy world, with everything to learn, 
everything to perceive. I thought I should have 
learned not to dread death, from having twice 
drawn near it, without being shadowed by it; 
but it seems I have learnt nothing. What if the 
next time it should be different, and if the 
terrors that I now feel should visit me ? 

I remember once taking an anaesthetic, and 
the horror of the recollection would forbid my 
ever willingly taking one again. After I had 
lost all sense of consciousness of my surround- 
ings, I went through a terrible agony in the 
inmost cell of my being ; I felt as though in some 
place of blank walls or dark waters my life was 
being crushed out of me, or rather that I myself 



The Gate of Death 103 

was being crushed and stamped into nothingness. 
It was not pain, but unutterable horror. The 
will seemed unable to consent to bear what it was 
forced to endure. 

July 29. 

What does one mean by faith? I think I 
understand by it a deep intuition, a lively hope, 
a path that descends into the darkness, but the 
first few steps of which are illumined by the 
light of reason and knowledge ; enough to believe 
that the path still winds through the gloom. 

I think that the discerning of a few steps, 
even of one step, is an integral part of faith. 
Some people seem to think it is enough to pos- 
sess the intuition and the hope, without any 
degree of certainty ; what lights their path is 
only another intuition, another hope. Some find 
the light in the statements of revealed religion ; 
but what I miss here is the fragment of scientific, 
of verifiable certainty, that I require. I do not 
think that faith is simply a blind confidence, a 
taking on trust what others choose to tell one, 
or what men have handed down, because there 



104 The Gate of Death 

are many persons of other religions who have 
the same blind confidence in the truth of their 
creed ; and who shall then decide which of the 
creeds is the true one ? 

No, it is not faith, if reason contradicts it; it is 
not faith merely to be prepared to be bitterly 
disappointed if one's hope turns out to be vain. 
But it is faith when reason can illuminate a little 
of the way, and confirm the fact that the path is 
there, though one cannot discern the whole ex- 
tent of it. Reason says, "The track certainly 
begins here ; I see it glimmering a little way 
into the dark ; but it may stop there, it may 
lead to wide wildernesses or broken precipices." 
The task of faith is to contradict the dark sur- 
mises of reason, to say, " It is enough to know 
that the path has a clear beginning ; my hope, 
my instinct tells me that it leads on through 
the darkness. Neither is complete without the 
other. Reason would keep us lingering on the 
threshold of our journey, afraid to set foot in 
the darkness, but faith without reason to assure 
it may be nothing more than a vain hope, a 



The Gate of Death 105 

beautiful dream. Only the perception of truth 
can make us dare to start ; only faith can give us 
confidence to proceed. 

July 31. 

I had to bear an attack of violent pain yester- 
day — not a serious matter, but the pain was 
almost intolerable for all that : it came in blinding 
flashes ; it seemed to have almost a poisonous 
hue and even scent of its own. I tried to be 
philosophical ; I tried to see if I could analyse 
what the extraordinary thing was, this acute and 
tingling sensation which for the moment ab- 
sorbed all other sensations, and concentrated the 
mind with a sort of shuddering horror upon a 
thing which seemed so external to itself, and yet 
so overwhelming, so unmanning, so intolerable. 

The semi-scientific optimist says that pain is a 
kind of danger-signal, and warns us that there is 
something that needs attention. That if there 
were no sensation in these thinly-guarded, elab- 
orate bodies of ours, we should go about with 
open wounds which would soon make an end 
of us ; but the worst of this is that, like all 



106 The Gate of Death 

optimistic theories, it only fits the general facts, 
and does not apply all along the line. Some of 
the most agonising pains we endure, such as tooth- 
ache and neuralgia, portend no serious mischief, 
whereas some of the deadlier diseases give no 
warning of their approach. 

One cannot help feeling that an Omnipotent 
Power, framing our constitution upon such deli- 
cate lines, ought either to have guarded us 
against attacks of sensations so profoundly dis- 
agreeable, or to have proportioned the pain to 
the seriousness of the cause ; or else that there is 
some rich and deep significance in the mystery 
which we cannot fathom. Here, again, we seem 
left so sadly in the dark. I have a friend who 
has to endure at intervals long and racking 
attacks of neuralgia. They enfeeble and un- 
nerve him ; they make him incapable of work 
and thought ; he drags himself wearily back to 
life again after one of these bouts of anguish. 
I have heard him say that he cannot trace any 
beneficial results from his sufferings, and that the 
only consequence is acute irritability and futility. 



The Gate of Death 107 

I suppose that he has endured in the course of 
his life, without any particular commiseration, an 
amount of pain which far exceeds all that many 
a martyr who has won eternal glory for his con- 
stancy has had to endure. The fact that in my 
friend's case this suffering is involuntary does 
not seem to me to make the mystery any plainer, 
indeed rather to deepen it, because if pain is 
voluntarily incurred, there is a certain bracing 
quality which comes to one's assistance. 

My own slight sufferings have not given me 
any increase of faith or patience. I only look 
back to those hours with a sort of incredulous 
horror, to think that there can be anything in 
the world which seems to be so profoundly con- 
trary to all one's natural instincts, and which 
seems to bear so little wholesome fruit. It seems 
such a treachery, in a world where there is so 
much that is beautiful and kindly, to find one- 
self suddenly confronted with a thing so ineffably 
horrible. 

One thing indeed it brings home to us a 
little, and that is the pain of the world ; and at 



108 The Gate of Death 

least after such sufferings I find myself stretch- 
ing out blind hands of supplication to the Father 
of all, that He will send to those that have to 
suffer some light in the darkness. But then 
there falls on me a terrible shadow at the 
thought of all the pain that is being borne, all 
the world over, by poor beasts of the field, by 
tender children, by sensitive women, by agonised 
men. I see the glance of frightened eyes, the 
blanched face, the beaded brow, the clenched 
hands, the restless movements of sufferers, until 
the pressure of the vision becomes intolerable. 
Pain falls so often upon those least fitted to bear 
it, upon those who cannot understand. One's 
heart goes out in utter pity to all who suffer, 
with a deep desire to comfort ; and yet I cannot 
even be sure that the prayer that I make with 
all the strength of my heart will cause God to 
lessen or to lighten a single pang. He would 
not surely have sent it so inexorably if it had 
not had some deep and tender meaning ; and if it 
has that deep and tender meaning, how dare I 
ask that it should be lightened ? 



The Gate of Death 109 

August 1. 

I should get better more quickly if I could but 
yield myself to a wise passivity, and let the heal- 
ing waters flow over me. I^ast night a great 
daddy-longlegs came blundering and whizzing 
about my lamp; fortunately for himself he was 
not burnt, and feeling tired, he made his way to 
the ceiling, attached himself to it by his long 
forelegs, and with wings and body and his other 
long clumsy legs hanging down, he addressed 
himself to sleep. 

To-day there has sate beside me on my table 
a dull fly with brown reticulated wings — an 
ugly fellow enough, with long whisks attached 
to his horny head. He seems sunk in a reverie. 
I disturbed him once ; he waved his attennae in 
remonstrance, and settled down to sleep again. 
The dog here, a collie, who has taken an un- 
accountable fancy to me, comes and lies for 
hours on the mat, hoping perhaps that I may 
be sensible enough to rise and take him out for 
a walk. He sleeps all night, he s 1 eeps all day ; 
only very occasionally, with his head laid flat 



no The Gate of Death 

upon the ground, I see that he follows my 
motions with brown and wistful eyes. If I 
speak, he does not move, but just thumps his 
tail upon the floor. I wish I could sleep as he 
does ; he resigns himself to slumber with a 
happy sigh, as if he were comfortably weary of 
the world. But all this time my own mind is 
a kind of torture to me. I can only read for a 
little, only write for a few minutes at a time ; 
I seem unable to reflect or meditate. Now 
would be the time, if I could, to think out a 
new book, but I cannot. The mind, ennuyi and 
vacuous, seems to wander about listlessly, like a 
person in a lumber-room, pulling out a memory, 
putting it back again, peering into corners, look- 
ing at things on shelves. It is degrading to find 
that one has so little control of it. I must learn 
to meditate, but that seems a difficult business. 
I suppose that I have got so used to thinking on 
paper, that I cannot do it otherwise. The Arabs 
have a state which they call, I think, Kef. It is 
not sleep, but neither is it waking. It is a kind 
of drowsy musing, in which the hours pass, they 



The Gate of Death in 

say, with great content and great rapidity. Per- 
haps I can practise this : it seems worth practising. 

The worst of the bodily exhaustion from 
which I am suffering half unconsciously is that 
it produces in the daytime periods of sleep which 
are quite different in quality from anything I 
have ever known. I am weighed down by an 
intolerable drowsiness ; I sink deep into a sort of 
heavy stupor. I awake with a sensation of dis- 
may, not knowing where I am or even who I am. 
Then consciousness returns with an unpleasant 
shock ; and soon the drowsiness overpowers me 
again. The misery of it is that such sleep does 
not make the time pass rapidly ; one can sleep 
and wake thus a dozen times in an hour, and be 
astonished to find that each stupor has only lasted 
a few moments ; but one seems better after it ; it 
only shows the desperate efforts which Nature 
makes to obtain the oblivion and repose of which 
she is in need. 

August 4. 

I remember copying an epitaph in a rustic 
church some years ago — Bassingbourn, I think 



ii2 The Gate of Death 

it was, near Royston, a pleasant leafy village. 
It was the grave of a gentleman of St. Ives, who, 
having experienced many of the Trials and most of 
the Vicissitudes of Fortune , calmly surrendered his 
breath in his 63rd year. I wish I knew what this 
pathetic person had endured, and why he found 
it so easy to die ; but it seems to me a sad 
mystery if the most that life can do for us is to 
make us ready to leave it. 

Again there comes into my mind a letter 
written by a very genial and innocent philo- 
sopher, who found that he was suffering from a 
fatal complaint necessitating an immediate opera- 
tion, from which it was doubtful if he could 
recover. He was a guileless, public-spirited, un- 
affected man ; and he wrote to a friend to tell 
him what had happened, saying that he found 
the prospect a very terrible one of quitting a 
world "in which, after all, it had been sweet to 
live." The words, I think, are a pathetic echo 
of a beautiful line in Tennyson's Maud. He 
did survive the operation, though only for a few 
months ; he had shown a perfect tranquillity and 



The Gate of Death 113 

courage throughout, visiting his friends up to 
the very day of the operation, conversing on all 
sorts of matters with cheerful and unabated in- 
terest, with this dark shadow in the background. 
Perhaps we are stronger and braver than we 
know or dare to hope ; but the worst of reason 
and imagination is that we can so clearly forecast 
and anticipate our sufferings and our end. The 
beasts of the field suffer too ; but they have, so 
far as we know, only to bear the actual pain of 
disease, they have not to bear the tenfold agony 
of foreboding. 

What we all desire is happiness and tranquillity, 
and we care little how we achieve it, so long as it 
is there. God sends it us sometimes in spite of 
suffering, in spite of ourselves ; but what we have 
to aim at is a vital faith, which can sustain us in 
the presence even of the terror of the unknown. 
It may not be in our power to attain to the pre- 
cise and intimate belief which sent martyrs to 
their death with an overpowering joy, but we 
can all practise a confidence and an acquies- 
cence in the will of God. It is strange that we 



ii4 The Gate of Death 

never seem to question why we are happy, in 
our happy days. That seems our native air ; we 
only begin to question the why and wherefore of 
things when we are miserable. 

Oh strange and sad mystery, as old as time : 
the mystery that we cannot solve, and that 
God will not solve for us ! Our reason tells us 
that God is mighty; our heart tells us that He is 
kind. 

I remember once staying in the house of a 
blind man. His wife and I went out for a walk, 
leaving him, at his request, sitting in the garden. 
We had hardly started, when she remembered 
that she had something to ask him, and we re- 
turned. He had already settled himself in his 
chair with that perfect stillness, that sublime 
patience that I have seen more than once in a 
blind man. I was near enough to hear what 
was said, though not near enough for him to be 
aware of my presence. She took his hand, and 
asked him the question, adding, "Are you sure 
you want nothing ?" He put her hand to his lips 
and kissed it, and smiled with a pathos that went 



The Gate of Death 115 

to my heart. " Nothing but my sight, dear," 
he said. It was the only time I had ever heard 
him say anything that was not perfectly cheerful 
and contented, and it affected me to tears. She 
bent over him weeping, encircling him with her 
arms. His patient helplessness evoked in her 
the deepest and tenderest love that I have ever 
seen, and at which I had often marvelled. 

I marvelled no longer, and I felt, too, that if 
we could but approach the Father of all with 
the same sweet and perfect patience, we should 
learn our lesson sooner, whatever that lesson 
may be. 

August 5. 
There is a mode of meeting death which one 
sometimes encounters in histories and biographies, 
even occasionally in real life, which arouses in us 
a species of shuddering admiration. That is the 
way in which it is met by the cynical, courageous, 
well-bred gentleman, and it consists in opposing 
to the assaults of death not the shield of faith, 
but the shield of good manners. Such was the 
death-bed of Charles II., a man whose theory 



1 1 6 The Gate of Death 

of life was to do whatever amused him, whether 
he found it in the pursuit of pleasure or in the 
governing of a kingdom. He had no belief in 
virtue or unselfishness ; but he believed in per- 
sonal honour and courage, and jested courteously 
to the very brink of the grave. Such a death- 
bed is not an edifying spectacle; but, after all, 
it is impossible not to admire a human being 
who, confronted with the darkness after a life 
full of zest and delight, allows no shadow of 
dismay to darken his features, no trace of timidity 
or complaint to bewilder his speech. It testifies, 
at least, to an extraordinary high spirit, to a 
singular personal bravery ; and the indomitable 
quality, exhibited by a frail creature in the pres- 
ence of the darkest judgments of its Maker, 
may be condemned, but cannot be despised ; it 
is like the courage of the red ant, who, if he be 
crushed to death, spends his last moments in an 
ungovernable fury, biting with all his might at 
the hand which slays him. I read once in an old 
biography of a French nobleman who received 
his death-warrant from a physician, and who 



The Gate of Death 117 

made it a point of honour to spend the few 
months that remained to him in exactly the 
same mood of distinguished and icy politeness 
in which he had spent his life. He allowed no 
attack of pain, however agonising, to prevent 
his appearing among his guests and exhibiting 
his accustomed courtesy. His view seems to 
have been that if his Creator chose to do what 
seemed to be an inconsiderate, ill-bred, and dis- 
agreeable thing, and to deprive him of the life 
which he had adorned, he would at least set a bet- 
ter example himself of distinguished behaviour. 
Such men as these are sustained by an invincible 
pride which has incontestably something that is 
noble about it. One feels that it runs in the 
wrong channels, because it depends upon high 
lineage and a family tradition of magnificence ; 
and the error lies in treating this inheritance as 
a thing which is held as a personal right, when 
it is, after all, only a gift bestowed by God. 
Such princes seem to hold instinctively that they 
confer a favour on humanity by belonging to it, 
and bear the consciousness of personal superiority 



n8 The Gate of Death 

with an innate and unshakable confidence. Yet 
the tranquillity with which they face death is of 
a fine quality, though the tranquillity of Socrates 
or Sir Thomas More is of an infinitely higher 
kind. In the former case it springs from a 
majestic pride which will not suffer a man to 
do anything that is unworthy or mean at the 
most tragic of moments. In the case of Socrates 
and Sir Thomas More, whom the near prospect 
of death did not even deprive of their sense of 
humour, it arises from a marvellous balance of 
mind, a serene realisation of the fact that, whether 
a man lives or dies, suffers or is glad, he is in the 
hands of the God who made him. The more 
that we practise this habit of mind, the more 
chance there is that we may meet death with 
calm dignity ; but even so, this cannot be attained 
without an innate gift of courage, a power of 
resolutely shutting the doors of the mind against 
painful and enfeebling imaginations. We can 
none of us be sure that the approach of pain 
and death may not bewilder, terrify, and unman 
us ; but God, who knows our weakness and our 



The Gate of Death 119 

strength, will not judge us for that. There can 
be no greater mistake than to judge the vitality 
and depth of a man's faith by his conduct 
in the last, closing act of his life ; a sensitive and 
imaginative man, who has lived purely and un- 
selfishly, may be overwhelmed and prostrated by 
the terrors of the dark end, while another man, 
who has lived unkindly and selfishly, pursuing 
his own pleasure, may make his last bow with 
a sneering courage, an unflinching courtesy, and 
pass undismayed and untroubled beneath the 
shadowy porches of death. 

August 6 and 7. 
I have often wondered whether the ideas of 
Oriental nations about death do indeed differ so 
strongly as we suppose from our own. It seems 
that their hold on life is somewhat feebler, and I 
suppose that the result of life in hot climates 
is to pitch the quality of it in a lower key, to 
decrease the desire for vigour and activity, 
and to increase the pleasure of indolence and ac- 
quiescence. We are always told that the Chinese 



120 The Gate of Death 

have little fear of death, and that the payment 
of a small sum to a Chinaman's family will per- 
suade a man to suffer death as a substitute for a 
criminal. 

But the theory that it arises from a more 
languid appreciation of life, from a tempera- 
mental acquiescence in the thought of the long 
silence, the last repose, has been for me upset by 
what we have heard of the behaviour of the 
Japanese in this last war. Here we have an 
intensely vital and progressive nation, assimi- 
lating new ideas, full of aspirations after reform 
and nationality, thrilling with political ardour. 
They appear to have fought in their battles 
with an incredible courage and devotion, and 
to have been literally in love with glorious 
death. Indeed, to die for their country appears 
to be the deepest passion of the Japanese heart. 
Strange instances that remind one of the spirit 
of Athens and Sparta have been quoted. I saw 
a letter of a Japanese mother to her son, a 
private soldier, which was found on his body 
after his death, bidding him go out and fight, 



The Gate of Death 1 2 1 

and expressing a hope that he would not re- 
turn. And yet they seem to have no belief 
in the continuance of identity ; they look for- 
wards confidently to entire annihilation. But it 
is not that deep fatalism which we are apt to 
attribute to Oriental nations that seems to give 
them courage ; it is a passionate enthusiasm for 
national honour, a sense of duty which is not 
stoical, but vivid and vital, a patriotism that re- 
sembles a deep personal love, combined with a 
positive predilection for death, if only life can 
be given for their country's good. It is not 
the good of individuals, the welfare of the home, 
that seems to be in their thoughts, but a pure 
and absolute emotion for the idea of the nation, 
which we Englishmen, for all our boasted pa- 
triotism, are very far from emulating. When 
one reads of these splendid and inspiring in- 
stances of devotion, even such a phrase as " What 
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" 
seems to be tainted by a kind of selfishness. The 
Japanese soldier will take the preservation of 
his country's honour in exchange for his soul, 



122 The Gate of Death 

not merely resolutely and courageously, but with 
the sense that he is exchanging a very poor thing 
for a very great one. Even so holy and devout 
a spirit as Newman confesses that to save his 
own soul was his dearest pre-occupation. ' * Shall 
I be safe if I die to-night? " was the thought 
that drove him to sacrifice all he held most 
dear for the Church of Rome. One cannot 
help feeling that the Japanese spirit is a more 
divine thing than that, because the most divine 
thing in the world is the impulse which bids 
us sacrifice everything, not only peace and joy, 
but the very power that enables one to appre- 
hend them, for the sake of a great idea. The 
Psalm gives us an excellent list of things which 
a man is to do — to chasten the tongue and to 
seek for peace — if he loves life and would fain 
see good days. But what if he would rather 
have his country great, not even knowing, as 
he lies asleep in death, whether she is great or 
no, than see any number of good days ? 

We are told that the Japanese arrive at this 
spirit by practising and inculcating, in schools and 



The Gate of Death 123 

homes, a noble kind of chivalry, a knightly sys- 
tem. But where did the spirit come from that 
bade them do it, and that prepared their hearts to 
desire and follow it ? How successful an experi- 
ment would it be, if we introduced such a system 
into our public schools? We get, it is true, a fine, 
generous, and uncomplaining temper among the 
best of our English boys, a spirit which makes 
them bear the hardships and sufferings of a long 
campaign with a blithe courage and a true sim- 
plicity ; but the best that we can do is not 
comparable to what the Japanese can do. What 
we develop is a sense of honour, a sense of in- 
souciance, a cheerfulness which tends to make the 
best of discomforts. But with all that there is in 
the hearts of our soldiers a deep desire to return 
home to those whom they love, to the familiar 
scenes, to the exercise of peaceful living ; but the 
Japanese soldier lies down to sleep on the eve of 
action with the bright hope that on the next day 
he may be fortunate enough to give his life for his 
country. That hope consoles and invigorates his 
heart, just as the hope of a glorious return to 



124 The Gate of Death 

home and life and love consoles and invigorates 
the hearts of our soldiers. 

Surely this is a problem which our preachers, 
our moralists, our psychologists may well ponder, 
— the possibility of educating the hearts of a nation 
into this supreme ardour for self-sacrifice and self- 
surrender. The best it seems that we can say 
is that self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control 
alone lead men to sovereign power. The Japanese 
soldier seems to feel that they can lead him to 
what is a better thing still — a glorious death, with 
no hope of a joyful resurrection. We may believe 
as Christians that our own is the truer point of 
view ; but I cannot resist the thought that the 
other is the nobler, because it triumphs joyfully 
and blithely over the last enemy that is to be 
destroyed. 

August 8. 

The great danger for myself, as for other re- 
flective people, is, I think, the tendency to live in 
memory rather than in the life of the present. 
Memory makes her pictures as a man may carve a 



The Gate of Death 125 

statue ; when it is done he sweeps away all the 
dust and chips, he puts away all the measuring- 
rods and tools, and the beautiful thing goes to be 
set in a gilded alcove in a palace corridor, with a 
crown of stars over its head. Memory does the 
same for one, all unconsciously, with no effort of 
the will ; it sweeps aside all the dreary hours. 
Suffering has to be very sharp to be remembered, 
and very continuous to be remembered with a 
shudder ; but a single thrill of beauty in a dreary 
day, how the memory enshrines that! 

I remember a heavy day a year ago ; I had to 
travel up to London on a business that was both 
anxious and wearisome, and I came away seeing 
no way out of the matter. About the time of sun- 
set I passed a village in the train ; a little way 
off, across the misty water-meadows, stood an old 
church among great elm-trees. The trees were 
all dark and gloomy, beginning to lose their colour 
in the uncertain light, but the western side of the 
tower was lit up with a faint rosy radiance, the 
last glimmer of the sinking sun. I have often 
thought of that since, and always with a secret 



i26 The Gate of Death 

joy ; I have forgotten the dreary burden of the 
day — at least the thought of it no longer weighs 
upon me with sadness, — yet the memory of the 
old tower, with the evening radiance, stays with 
me as a recollected delight. The old fables made 
the waters of I^ethe, the stream of forgetfulness, 
flow between life and the happy fields of death, 
that a soul might drink and forget its sorrows; 
but the mind does that of itself, and the stream of 
memory is rather one of the rivers that make glad 
the city of God. One forgets one's own troubles 
and anxieties ; one can forget one's own sins. 
What one cannot forget is the pain that one has 
inflicted on others, on those that have loved us, by 
unkindness and neglect. One sorrows over that 
with a fruitless sorrow; and the only cure for that 
would be to meet those dear ones, and to be 
forgiven with a smile. 

Another strange temperamental thing is that 
one so soon wearies of pain and even of pleasure, 
but one does not weary of happiness. The longer 
it lasts, the more one grudges its ceasing. 

These thoughts hold for me almost the surest 



The Gate of Death 127 

hope of immortality than anything holds. We 
are made with so deep an instinct for happiness, 
so short a memory for pain, so faithful a love for 
those for whom we care, that it is harder for me 
to believe that we go down into silence and 
nothingness than it is to believe that we shall 
meet our dear ones, and that we shall inherit 
happiness — somewhere — far off; we seem so 
ready for happiness, whenever it is God's will 
that it shall begin. 

I have sometimes thought that our life here is 
like one of those suspensions in music, which is 
in itself a discord ; it is full of expectancy ; the 
spirit stands on the brink, waiting for the resolu- 
tion; and then it slides into the great sweet 
chord, the perfect harmony in which we rest. 

August 9. 
Perhaps it is true that a solitary man, who is 
neither father nor husband, and has thus missed 
touching life at its most vital point, does not 
understand quite what it is to be bound up with 
the world. But I do not think the paternal 



128 The Gate of Death 

instinct is a very strong one. The love of a 
father for an infant child is a very complex 
emotion. I am not sure that a father does not 
love a child, when it is born, principally for its 
mothers sake; also partly for the fact that the 
birth of a child perpetuates or tends to per- 
petuate the family, the stock — a species of pride 
which is by no means confined to the inheritors 
of property. In any case, the father's love for a 
child is of the nature rather of a mental process, 
and contains imaginative and moral elements. 
It is not a deep physical instinct, as it is with 
a mother ; it has nothing of the deep mystery, 
the exquisite yearning, the supreme joy which a 
mother feels in the case of a child. The emotion 
which a man feels at becoming a father is some- 
times surprising in its strength, but it has a mix- 
ture of pride and compassion and responsibility 
about it, which is a very different thing from the 
intense, unreasoning, natural joy of the mother. 
I have sometimes thought that the reason why 
faith is an easier thing to a woman is because 
faith is so much bound up with love, that a 



The Gate of Death 129 

woman, to whom love is a so much deeper and 
more vital necessity than to a man, has in her 
heart a kind of instinctive and unquestioning 
affection, which answers many questions which a 
man tries to decide by reason. To a woman her 
child is so much a part of herself that she loses 
that sense of isolated identity which a man is apt 
to feel ; and thus a woman, with children of her 
own, craves less for assurance as to the continua- 
tion of identity, because she feels that, in a sense, 
she survives death, if her children live after her. 
A woman, too, is conscious of a direct union of 
life with her children, of a kind that a man does 
not instinctively feel. Love and marriage bring 
that sense of extended life nearer to a man than 
anything else, but it is still on imaginative rather 
than an instinctive process ; and love being often, 
as it is, more a surprising episode in a man's life 
than a permanent atmosphere, when a passion is 
over, the sense of solitary identity is apt to recur 
again with fresh and intensified force. 

The question then is, whether it is possible for 
a man to have a sense of direct union — by which I 



130 The Gate of Death 

mean something much stronger than direct relation 
— with any other spirit, human or divine. Mystics 
of all ages have taught that this direct union is 
possible with God ; but I think it is true to say 
that, among mystics, women have this experience 
oftener and with far greater force than men ; and 
the question comes in, whether it is not the trans- 
lation of a human instinct, of the love which finds 
its normal satisfaction in husband and child — 
whether this vital instinct is not transferred by a 
certain imaginative power, however unconsciously 
exercised, to union with God. I mean that a wo- 
man, without lover or child, may yet be conscious 
of so imperious, so constraining a force of love for 
some unknown object, that she cannot believe 
that there is not some counterpart, some being 
that satisfies the hunger of the heart, that meets 
and returns the longing glance, the eager leaning- 
out of the spirit towards an unknown mate ; and 
that this instinct, finding no earthly satisfaction, 
centres itself on the power behind the world with 
a passionate anthropomorphism. It is one of 
those things that is incapable of proof, because it 



The Gate of Death 13 r 

is quite possible for a man to conceive an intense 
emotion for a thing that is a product of his imagi- 
nation. Even a human lover often credits the 
object of his affection with all kinds of qualities 
which have no real existence, and loves that ob- 
ject all the more fervently for qualities which exist 
only in his own imagination. In fact, it may 
be said that an intense love for anything does not 
prove the existence of the object of that love. 

I have felt myself, as I have said, at times and 
for long periods together, this sense of a direct 
union with God; but it is not a permanent one; 
and it is this which sometimes makes me wonder 
whether it is really there, although it is accom- 
panied by a confidence and a certitude which, at 
the time, seems to defy the utmost scepticism; it 
seems, when it is there, to be indubitable and real, 
with an intensity of reality that few things attain 
to; but then it leaves me, and I find myself won- 
dering whether it is not some temporary harmony 
and balance of nature, some adjustment of physi- 
cal and intellectual elements, that gives a sense of 
unison with the heart of the world. 



132 The Gate of Death 

But in any case, whatever my conditions may 
be, I may try to break through the close and 
narrow fence that bounds my spirit. The real 
terrors of life, which lie behind all other ter- 
rors, are the loneliness in which so many of us 
seem to live, and the fear that we may cease to be. 
Other spirits seem, to our dulled and dimmed 
senses, to be wandering, as we wander, in the 
wilderness; over all seems to brood a vast power 
that bade us be, and that leaves us, not indeed 
ignorant of His existence, but able, it would 
appear, to live our isolated, self-absorbed life apart 
from Him. What we desire is to burst the crust 
that confines us, to be one with other hearts, to be 
one with the Eternal Heart, not merely to live 
out our little span of life within the narrow cell 
that bounds us. If we could but link our being 
to others, not by mere signals and gestures, by 
speech and glance, but by some vital interfusion 
of essence and identity; if we could feel ourselves 
one with God, and God one with us — nay, if we 
could even look forwards with a certain hope to 
the possibility of such union, there is no pain, 



The Gate of Death 133 

no suffering which would not become bearable. 
It would endure but for a time ; but the dark 
doubt that besets us is the doubt whether we are 
not condemned to this severe isolation of spirit, 
and whether this essence of self, which we feel 
thrilling and beating within us, may not itself 
cease to be; as the ripple which stirs under the 
flying footsteps of the breeze on some silent lake 
dies back into the liquid level, and is as though 
it has never been, — a mere concourse of atoms, a 
mere manifestation of some unheeding law. 

August 10. 
I am sure we are stronger in mind and spirit 

when we can once make up our mind to a frank 
recognition of evil in the world ; I do not mean 
by that that we may acquiesce in our own faults ; 
but we ought not to make a tragedy out of them, 
a hopeless agony ; one must rather regard evil as 
one regards a rainy day, cheerfully and sanely 
combating it ; just as a wise doctor wastes no 
time in commiserating a patient, does not pause 
to wonder why pain must be, but takes prompt 



134 The Gate of Death 

and simple measures for its relief. It is no 
good blindfolding one's eyes and trying to 
believe evil is not there; in dealing with it in 
others we must try to realise that it is often a 
perverted vigour, a misapplied force ; we must 
try to find a wholesome channel where that force 
may flow. In combating evil in ourselves, we 
ought to meet it patiently and quietly, in the 
moment ; not accumulating a horror of old and 
frequent failures, nor anticipating an endless suc- 
cession of temptations ; we soon get to know our 
besetting faults ; we must try to organise our 
lives so that the conditions of resistance may be 
as favourable as possible. We must try to deal 
with sin pathologically rather than emotionally ; 
the thing to dread is a feeble drifting, a tame ac- 
quiescence in evil ; so long as we are sure that we 
shall conquer if we have time enough, that is 
what matters. That is where very religious 
people make a mistake, in treating evil as a hor- 
rible thing intruded by the perversity of man into 
a perfectly benevolent and perfectly pure scheme. 
The instincts of self-preservation and of reproduc- 



The Gate of Death 135 

tion are at the bottom of most of our sins ; and 
who will pretend that these instincts are not 
given us by God? He is behind evil as He is 
behind good. Christ, it seems to me, realised 
that, far more than most of His priests admit. 
He lived as simply, as tenderly with sinners as 
He did with righteous people ; and He seems to 
have thought and taught that the danger of sin 
was nothing like so great as the danger of com- 
placency; the people whom He recognised as His 
chosen flock were all those who had a passionate 
desire for goodness, peace, beauty, however 
foully and frequently they had fallen ; the only 
people whom He censured and condemned, with 
a bitterness that terrifies and appals, were the 
respectable people who despised sinners, and 
felt at ease in Zion. As long as the desire to be 
pure and true does not desert one, one is not lost; 
one need never despair over a fall ; when one 
ought to despair is when one begins to approve 
of one's rectitude, to compare oneself favourably 
with others, to reckon up one's services to 
humanity. 



136 The Gate of Death 

There is a beautiful pair of old stories which 
hold in them a fine moral. There was once a 
bishop called Zachary Pearce ; he held many pre- 
ferments, and he was a highly respectable and 
virtuous man. When he lay dying he smiled to 
himself; one of those who stood by asked him 
what it was that brought him such a heavenly 
peace, and the good Bishop said tranquilly, " The 
consciousness of a well-spent life." 

When the great Bishop Butler, a man of real 
devotion and self-denial, lay on his death-bed, he 
showed signs of grievous distress of mind. His 
chaplain, who was with him, seeing this, at last 
ventured to ask what was the cause of his sorrow. 
The Bishop, in broken accents, said that he had 
lived with a desire to serve Christ, but now that 
he came to die he was troubled by a terrible fear. 
"I cannot believe," he said, "that He died for 
me." The chaplain felt bewildered, and unable 
to find any arguments that might console him ; 
butg instead of trying to remind him of all his 
unselfish labours, he merely quoted the verse, 
" Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast 



The Gate of Death 137 

out." The Bishop's look of pain faded away, 
and he died soon after, murmuring the words. 

One would rather, I feel, weep like Butler than 
smile like Pearce ; one would rather be burdened 
with a sense of failure, than courageous with a 
sense of success in that last sad hour. 

August 11. 
In these hot nights my window is left open, 
and as I lie awake I often wonder what can be 
the strange sounds I hear, sighs, far-off cries, 
noises as though things fell, musical notes, 
languid boomings. I suppose they all have some 
explanation, if one only knew. Many of them 
are probably very minute noises quite close to 
me, transformed in my restless brain to loud 
noises very remote. Last night I heard a burst 
of music — utterly inexplicable. If I were super- 
stitious I might think it heralded my death, but 
I do not believe that. Half the beauty of these 
sounds consists in the fancy, which compares and 
likens them to other sounds, and then calls up a 
scene to suit them. The firs in the garden 



138 The Gate of Death 

murmur in the breeze of dawn like a falling sea ; 
and then in my mind I see a golden sand, or 
a rock-cave with gem-like translucent water, 
emerald green, lapping softly against the pre- 
cipitous ledges. Or there comes a faint sigh 
from the garden-alleys, and I think of some 
wandering woodland nymph, sorrowing for she 
knows not what, with her feet white on the turf, 
looking mournfully out of her dark eyes. 

I do not seem to make these fancies ; they 
come of themselves. They leave me wondering 
what the instinct for beauty is ; because the 
thoughts that thrill one with a delicious joy do 
not seem to deal with things which give one any 
material satisfaction. It is a desire which lies 
deeper than any hopes of comfort, ease, or bodily 
joy. 

I saw last night the dawn come palely and 
tenderly flushing up the sky, so that the ridged 
cloud-rack looked like laminated pearl ; below 
lay the quiet woods in a dewy peace. What 
bodily satisfaction could all that promise me? 
None ! and yet it spoke to my weary mind like 



The Gate of Death 139 

a sweet and pure music, until I sank like a child 
into a happy languor of sleep that had so long 
delayed. 

August 13. 
It is odd, is it not, how, in dealing with the 
thought of death, the mind, in reverie, continues 
to consider pathetic and impressive the very points 
that are really so immaterial. One of the most 
heart-rending things I remember was when we 
had to dismantle the old Rectory, when my 
father died. He was a man of much method and 
preciseness, and he had a hundred little arrange- 
ments to provide against the most unlikely con- 
tingencies ; stores of bits of string, and boxes 
which he never wanted, little "dodges," as he 
called them, for filing papers, classifying books, 
keeping gum moist, of which half the pleasure 
was in the ingenuity of the contrivance. All 
these little devices had to be broken up, papers 
torn down, books sold ; the homely study in 
which he so delighted had to be stripped bare. 
I went about the sad work, feeling like a cruel 
traitor, choked with tears. 



140 The Gate of Death 

So, too, I reflect that if my own death had 
occurred in the little rooms in town where I have 
lived so long and so uncomfortabfy, and yet into 
every angle of which my spirit seems to have 
fitted itself, as ivy grows over a wall — all this 
apparatus would have been ruthlessly cleared out 
and dispersed. Yet why should I care ? If I live 
on in spirit, the one thing I shall have no heed of 
is the poor furniture that in life was gathered 
round my weak body ; and if I do not survive, 
how much less will it matter ? I wonder what is 
the tenderness that gathers thus about the old 
rooms, the familiar books, the well-known pic- 
tures? One gives a personality somehow to 
them all ; and I feel that supposing that my 
spirit thus survives, and can take cognisance of 
earthly matters, I shall still grieve at seeing an 
old book that I have loved and marked, lying 
coverless in an ashpit, or exposed for sale in a 
crowded book-shop. It is a false pathos, I am 
sure ; and yet it is so deeply rooted in the human 
heart, this power of sweet and gentle attachment, 
that it is hard not to think that it means some- 



The Gate of Death 141 

thing, and is the symbol that there is some- 
thing permanent to love, if only we could find out 
what it is. 

August 14. 

I suppose that it is the cessation of ordinary 
life, the confinement entailed by illness, that 
makes my thoughts dwell so persistently upon 
open air scenes of my past life that have been 
familiar to me. What is strange is that the 
mind does not select memorable scenes to dwell 
upon, but the simplest, the most commonplace 
places, which I hardly knew indeed that I re- 
tained in my memory at all. All to-day I have 
been haunted, again and again, by the picture 
of a gate among quiet fields, on a low upland 
commanding a wide view of fen country. It 
was at a place where at one time I used often 
to go and shoot, which was extremely secluded ; 
it was far from the highroad, and no track led 
through it. 

I have seen the scene to-day as I used to see it 
after the harvest was over, with wide stretches of 
pale stubble here and there, a spinney splashed 



142 The Gate of Death 

with autumn tints, the ashes showing blue-green 
among the other foliage. A grass-road, much 
ploughed up by the wheels of carts, led to the 
gate. I suppose I must have stood opposite to 
it out shooting on some occasion, but, as I say, 
I connect no incident with it, and I did not 
even know it lurked so faithfully in my mind. 
As I have seen it all to-day, it has been at the 
hour of sunset; there are large clouds in the 
sky, faintly tinted with a rosy light in the west. 
The gate stands open, and has a weary and ex- 
pectant air, as though the homebound waggons, 
piled high with sheaves, drawn by a clanking 
team, may soon be passing through. Very high 
in the air, winging its way slowly and intently, 
flies a solitary bird, a pigeon, steering for some 
well-known wood. This was always to me the 
symbol of utter restfulness, the weary bird, after 
its day-long wandering in wide fields, flying 
calmly home, through the last light, to roost in 
some familiar wood. It is a sweet allegory to me 
of the home-coming of the tired spirit, to rest 
all night in the tall dark tree, stirred by the 



The Gate of Death 143 

cool breezes, while the darkness falls over the 
quiet fields. Am I too turning homewards as 
the shadow falls ? I know not. But how blest 
should I be, if I could make my way home with 
that quiet confidence, that hope of rest, in the 
dying light ! The sun sinks lower, the plain 
seems brimmed with mist ; but still in my 
thought the rooks sail round and round above 
thetall elms of the Hall ; the shadows lengthen ; 
while still the solitary bird, high in heaven, 
among the rich radiance of the waning light, 
beats its patient wings, steering ever, by some 
faithful instinct, to the home of its rest 

August 16 and 17. 
I have been haunted to-day with an odd per- 
sistency, because with no sense of volition, by the 
thought of a place that was very familiar to me 
a few years ago. This was a tract of moorland, 
covered with heather, gorse, and pale bent, close 
to the sea, in a remote part of Scotland ; from the 
edge of the moor, steep crags descended to the sea, 
which chafed loud on the rocky reefs and iron 



144 The Gate of Death 

headlands. Where the crags were steepest, stood 
the weather-worn ruins of an ancient castle ; the 
walls were immensely thick ; the ledges grass- 
grown ; the sea-wind piped mournfully among 
the buttresses and broken windows. It was so old 
and rugged a place that it seemed rather carved 
out of the cliff than built upon it. The curlews 
used to breed on the moorland in great numbers, 
and the thought of the place brings back the 
melancholy and yet sweet note of that shy bird ; 
that cry, and the whisper of the pulsing sea below, 
falling at rhythmic intervals, after a suspended 
pause, on the boulders, were the only sounds 
audible there. A wide extent of sea was visible, 
like a floor of marble, streaked with strange 
lines and loops, and dappled with purple patches ; 
a few fishing-boats could be seen crawling slowly 
on the wrinkled tide ; far to the west one could 
discern silent speeding sails, or the long trains of 
smoke of ocean steamers ; down on the sea's rim, 
on clear days, were the shadowy headlands and 
dim mountains of Ireland. 

The place — desolate, wind-swept, and cold of 



The Gate of Death 145 

hue as it was, except when flushed by the flower 
of the ling, or touched with golden light by the 
blooming of the gorse — had always a peculiar and 
mystical charm for me, a quiet loneliness, a stern 
tranquillity. There was nothing forbidding about 
its desolateness — it was rather pathetic and sad, 
uncheered by any brightness or richness of aspect, 
and yet with a brave and vigorous life of its own. 
The ruined stronghold gave it a human associa- 
tion ; one felt that a strong and stern life had been 
lived there ; one could imagine how the windows 
of the dark fortress must have glowed en winter 
nights with leaping fire and blazing torches. 

It was a land rich in memories of ancient fights 
and warring chieftains ; it had doubtless seen 
strange and sad things, that black tower. One 
could imagine the return of some dispirited troop, 
with a horse led gently along, bearing a helpless 
swaying burden — the form of one who had ridden 
out blithely enough at daybreak ; one could pic- 
ture the sad gazing of loving frightened eyes 
from the high windows, hardly daring to surmise 

what had happened. It had been besieged too, 
10 



%4& The Gate of Death 

that grim fastness, not once nor twice. The 
smoke had risen up from it, streaming landward 
in a heavy coil, the flames bursting from the para- 
pets, while a train of despairing captives, men-at- 
arms going heavily, women dreading what might 
be, bewildered children, had been herded across 
the moorland tracks. Tender things, too, it had 
seen ; young love and bridal mirth ; it had echoed 
to childish voices, and had been beloved as a dear 
home by forgotten hearts. 

It is strange what affinities certain places have 
for one's spirit. All to-day, as I sat and read and 
talked, I seemed to be threading the moorland, 
or sitting where, in the middle of the tract, a 
brown stream of hill- water ran hoarsely through a 
rocky gorge to the sea . How often, when the wind 
thundered in the crags, have I stood at the sea- 
ward end of the little gorge, to watch the falling 
water blown back upon the rock-face in spirts of 
dark foam. That bleak memory-haunted place 
often seemed to me like a parable of my own life, 
somewhat bare and homeless, wind-swept, andun- 
visited. Men's lives, as a rule, seem tome full of 



The Gate of Death 147 

warmth and richness, like homesteads in com- 
fortable pastures, sheltered with tall trees, musical 
with slow streams. My own life has had a cer- 
tain bareness and bleakness about it ; I have 
drawn near to many men, but close to none. I 
have somehow missed that richer inner sense of 
life inwoven with life, the sense of home and 
hearth. I have known what it is to be loved, 
but not what it is to be an essential part of 
others' lives. When I stood, as I stood a 
few weeks ago, on the threshold of the dark, 
this had a certain grim comfort about it. I did 
not feel the clinging of warm hands about me, 
whose clasp I dared not unloose ; and yet though 
that agony was spared me, I would have had it 
otherwise if I could. I would rather have sunk to 
my rest, trying to catch through dim eyes the last 
glimmer of love in faces that might have been a 
part of myself. The homelessness of the unknown 
land seemed bitterly present to me ; I would have 
wished to feel that I could have waited, in the 
dark land beyond, for those whom I loved to join 
me. I have loved this earth very tenderly ; I 



148 The Gate of Death 

have loved trees and houses, fields and valleys, 
days of bright sunshine, fiery sunsets, days of 
weeping rain, with an almost passionate love — a 
love deeper and more intimate than I have given 
to my fellow-men. And thus I feel that, through 
my misfortune or my fault, I have somehow missed 
the best part of life. I have been in the world, 
and not of it. And yet I feel — " These quivering 
heartstrings prove it," as the sad poet writes — 
that it need not have been so ; that hidden in the 
mist has moved one whom I could have loved ; 
and yet my life has been full of much happiness, 
and I am loth to leave the warm kind world. 
But now that I have returned from the dark 
threshold, I return with a hope that this nearer 
love may await me yet. Sharp and bitter as the 
suffering would have been, it is better to loose the 
trembling grasp of the hands that would detain 
us, and whose life is knit with ours, than to step 
in loneliness to the gate. 

Even as I write, I return in thought to the wild 
moorland. I hear the wind whisper in the grass, 
and the hidden voice of the sea. I hear again the 



The Gate of Death 149 

faint crying of the curlews rising and dipping over 
the heather ; but it is to each other that they call. 
Each time that the faint note sounds they draw 
nearer, mate to mate. Would that my own sad 
voice could wake an answering call! Even now 
they are sheltered together, bright eyes and warm 
plumes, through the dark hours of the night, till 
the grey morning wakes upon the moor, and the 
glowing sun casts a soft radiance upon crag and 
heather and dismantled walls. 

August 18. 

It was a delightful day when I could first crawl 
down-stairs, and, propped up in curious tranquillity 
in a big arm-chair, could listen to some music. 
My sister is not a great performer, but she plays 
accurately and with quiet, delicate taste, simple old 
music — Scarlatti, Corelli, Bach. This is what I 
like best in my present mood. I do not think I 
could bear the great bewildering tender masters of 
later time, with all the sickness of the soul in their 
music. But these old gavottes and minuets bring 
a kind of sunshine into the air that darts to and 



150 The Gate of Death 

fro, and enlivens the sombre day, as the warm 
firelight leaps on chair and wall. It makes me 
utterly and perfectly content, and gives me dreams 
of surpassing sweetness, heightening my quiet 
mood with a serene joy. The tripping notes, 
the gentle recurring phrases, the orderly proces- 
sions, the perfect close, are like deep draughts of 
well-water to a thirsty man. Yet how utterly in- 
explicable it all is ! How have these ordered vi- 
brations of sound the power to move our hearts to 
an unreasoning joy, a heavenly mirth ? Of all 
arts, music is by far the most mysterious, for it 
arouses no recollections, constructs no picture. It 
begins and ends with itself. Yet these phrases 
are like living things, like the path of sparks upon 
the dark ; each with a perfect individuality, like 
quiring spirits. I,et me be content with my joy ; 
let me not try thus to pierce behind the surface : 
and yet the very wonder of it is more than half 
the joy. 

August 19. 

I have been sitting out to-day on the lawn; I 
am not yet allowed to walk, but I am carriedViit 



The Gate of Death 151 

in a chair. I had rather a bad night last night, 
full of broken dreams. I saw and talked to mul- 
titudes of people. I wandered in prodigious land- 
scapes, forest valleys with huge black mountains 
looking ever. I saw a vast amber-coloured river, 
leagues wide, pouring steadily in a huge fall over 
a precipice into a narrow gorge. It fell with a ma- 
jestic regularity, but in absolute silence. Very 
slowly my consciousness came back to me. The 
window of my room has a red blind over which 
curtains are draped ; but they do not quite meet 
at the top, and the result is that in the earl}- morn- 
ing the little gap looks like a red sword-blade. 
What a curious part that blade has played in my 
life for the last few months. When I have been 
ill and feverish, it has seemed to me like a fiery 
sword in the hand of an angel at an immense dis- 
tance. This morning I woke, wondering what it 
was, and then there darted into my mind a sudden 
joy, the joy of returning health. The waking 
hour is often to me a time of great melancholy and 
sadness. Mistakes seem irreparable then, hopes 
fade into ashes; but to-day I simply lay in perfect 



152 The Gate of Death 

peace and gladness, and the mood has been with 
me all day. 

When I was moved into the garden it was the 
same ; I had no desire to read or talk. I simply- 
looked and wondered. They had been mowing 
the little lawn, and there was a fragrant heap of 
grass beside me. The flowers and the trees were 
enchanting ; a crystal dew lay on the leaves, and 
the air blew cool out of the shrubbery, laden with 
the rich sweet smell of the earth. I have often 
wondered why that scent is so sweet. It is not a 
curious honied smell, like the smell of a flower; 
it brings with it an aroma of dying leaf and de- 
caying spray ; but it is enchantingly fresh and 
delicious. Can it be an old inheritance from sav- 
age ancestors — the scent of the woods in the morn- 
ing, as some old half-barbarous forefather went 
out in his rough coat, hunting-spear in hand, light 
of heart ? Some of our deep instincts come to us, 
I often feel, out of a very far-off time, and from 
very primeval conditions. The joy of sport, of 
killing one's meat, for instance, is out of all pro- 
portion to the advantages which, in civilised days, 



The Gate of Death 153 

result from the act. When one brings a partridge 
down with a clean shot, the satisfaction is absurdly 
in advance of the success. That is a very old joy, 
I am sure. 

While I sate, a robin with a bright eye and a 
burnished breast came and hopped about me, ruf- 
fling his feathers, and now and then uttering a 
sharp brisk note. I suppose that it is only a stu- 
pid courage in reality that makes him so bold; 
but it was hard to think that he was not conscious 
of something of the loving admiration that I felt 
for the soft, alert, blithe little creature. I asked 
for some bread ; rolled and flipped him a few pel- 
lets, which he took with a businesslike air, and 
flew off to discuss them at his ease in the laurus- 
tinus. My sister tells me that she is sure that the 
robins have carefully defined districts of their own, 
spheres of influence into which the others do not 
intrude. She walks along and lures a robin by 
bread-crumbs into the next region; up to a certain 
point he is left unmolested ; but when he is once 
past the border-line, out comes the next chieftain 
with feathers all on end, and chases the intruder 



154 The Gate of Death 

away. That is the odd thing about these crea- 
tures ; they seem so strangely clever in certain 
directions, so strangely unintelligent in others. 
And then one cannot communicate with them in 
the least degree, beyond cultivating a certain fear- 
lessness on their part ; yet the affection one feels 
for them is a very real thing ; though they can- 
not reciprocate it. People talk of animals as hav- 
ing no reason, nothing but blind instinct. They 
do reason, I am sure ; but their mental processes 
are utterly unintelligible. Are they conscious, I 
wonder, of themselves and their identities, and 
their difference from other living beings ? They 
know their own kind well enough and are at ease 
with them. 

The life of a bird! Fancy the joy of being able 
at any moment to rise above the earth, to see it 
laid out like a map ; to see the tops of trees which 
no other eye can see; to swing secure and undiz- 
zied, when the great green branching thing sways 
in the wind! It surely is the strangest thing that 
we men have discovered so many things that are 
so much more wonderful than mere flight, and yet 



The Gate of Death 155 

seem to get no nearer to an art that is practised by 
millions of creatures round us, every day. The 
telegraph, the steam-engine, photography — if one 
had described such things to a Roman he would 
have laughed in one's face ; they would have 
seemed to him the idlest of silly tales ; yet if a 
prophet had said to him that men would soon learn 
to fly like birds, that would not have seemed in 
the least incredible to him ; the truth is that we 
do not, as we fondly think, advance where we will, 
but the very paths on which we advance are all 
laid out for us beforehand — we talk of discovering 
all these secrets, where our ancestors spoke of the 
revelation of God : and yet the revelation of these 
secrets of nature is a far more tremendous conde- 
scension, a far more close investigation of the mind 
of God than the ill-attested records of old miracles 
and signs. And } T et we ponder over and discuss 
the old tales with deep concern, and take these 
new wonders with a stupid indifference. We are 
not so much wiser than the robins, after all ! 



156 The Gate of Death 

August 20. 
! How strange, is it not, that the one part of 
death we are made by tradition and association 
to fear is the one part of it, the terrors of which 
are altogether empty and vain — the last sight of 
the stiffened form, the funeral pomp, the coffin 
with its terrible suggestive shape, the burial in 
the oozy clay, the emblems of mortality — the 
sightless, grinning skull, the mouldering bone. 
With all these things at least the parting spirit 
has no concern, and yet we frighten ourselves 
with the thought that we too must suffer these 
ugly rites, so full of dismay. Looking back 
through the years, I remember when the first 
sight of these things came into my life. It was 
when I was a child in the nursery ; we were 
walking with our nurses, and saw a cavalcade of 
mourning coaches, a hearse adorned, as was the 
custom in those days, with two rows of black 
nodding plumes, drawn up at the door of a 
house — even while we passed, the polished coffin 
was brought awkwardly and horribly down the 
stairs, and thrust into the hearse. There was a 



The Gate of Death 157 

little pale crowd of gazers assembled, with bare 
heads. The bereaved husband appeared at the 
door, his face full of grief. Then the procession, 
with mutes enveloped in long black-scarfed hats, 
set slowly off. To the imagination of a child 
it was the most horrible pageant that could be 
devised. The crested horses, the black plumes on 
the hearse, that waved all together like a com- 
pany of ghosts conversing, the dark coaches, 
with pale faces peering out, or with handker- 
chiefs pressed to their eyes — what wonder that 
it was for weeks a sickening nightmare and 
obsession ? 

These rites are utterly heathen and barbarous 
things, and we ought to banish them from among 
us. For children especially, at their impres- 
sionable age, they are a revolting cruelty. For 
them at least death should be veiled in the same 
mystery as birth. A child is brought into the 
world in stealth and privacy. Hardly a hint 
comes to the children of what is expected, till 
they are led in a joyful moment to see their new 
brother or sister, brought by the angels, or found 



158 The Gate of Death 

dropped among the bushes of the garden. In some 
such seemly mystery should death be concealed. 
Secretly and by stealth should the poor frame be 
taken from the house, reduced to ashes, buried 
with no concourse. The feeling that bids one take 
the last look of the beloved form, so terribly and 
sadly changed, frozen to a wax-like pallor, and 
follow the poor body to the grave is all a survival 
of barbarous times ; it causes us to dwell on the 
sad accidents of mortality, on corruption and de- 
cay. It is not a true or a tender instinct. It 
drags us down to earth when we should be 
ascending to heaven ; it keeps our affections 
hovering round the poor tenement of clay, till 
we turn from it in speechless horror and invol- 
untary disgust. I would have all the incidents 
of burial made as private as possible ; not till 
the body was laid in the ground would I have 
any solemnity or function. And then I would 
have a service as beautiful and as hopeful as 
possible, with every incident that could remind 
one of death banished, with the mind beckoned 
and pointed rather to the thoughts of life and 



The Gate of Death 159 

the mystery of the future. If I could please 
myself I would -have my body taken up, just as 
it was, the moment I had ceased to breathe, and 
laid uncoffined and unadorned in the ground. 
It is the life and the spirit, the mind and the 
heart, we love, not the perishing frame. 

There are stern and unfeeling natures who 
would say that it is well to impress the young 
and the thoughtless with the sight of death, the 
sense of mortality. Alas, it is only the morbid side 
of the imagination that is impressed. The active 
and healthy-minded child sees the sight with curi- 
osity and forgets it instantly. The sensitive child 
is endowed with a dark obsession. There is pain 
and sorrow enough in the world for us to spare in- 
vesting death with grim terrors of our own. The 
very oppression of the darkened house in which 
the body lies is an added weight, a false and mor- 
bid shadow ; its result is that, at the very time 
when we ought to be grieving as sincerely and 
tenderly as possible, speaking and thinking as 
naturally and quietly as we can of the dear one 
we have lost, we are preoccupied with a throng 



160 The Gate of Death 

of gloomy circumstances, of agitated arrange- 
ments, of trivial cares. All this -is not true and 
wholesome grief, but a macabre sentiment, a diffi- 
cult horror. Nothing that we can do can decrease 
or lighten the burden of death, but to trick the 
event out in dramatic trappings, to surround it 
with an appalling mummery, is surely un- 
worthy of Christian hope and Christian joy. 
Both our imagination and our reasonableness 
are at fault ; we treat the poor body with a 
false remorse, as though we were doing our 
dead friend a service, with an honour and a 
care which we often denied to him living. 
Instead of doing all we can to make ourselves 
and others realise that it is he no longer, but a 
mere worn-out vesture, to return to the dust out 
of which it was moulded, we behave as if the poor 
frame was more himself than ever ; we see that 
it is duly vested and lies softly. And yet, so 
deeply is the instinct implanted in most of us by 
long survival, that it defies reason and wisdom 
alike, and we tend to feel that the denying of the 
hideous solemnity to our friend would be a thing 



The Gate of Death 161 

which lie would somehow mutely resent, whereas 
there is hardly a living man or woman who would 
not, if they could, spare their friends the sad 
wretchedness of the funeral. Even if a man of 
more kindness and fortitude than usual should 
leave directions that his burial should be swiftly 
proceeded with, and that he should be laid, as he 
died, in the earth, we should feel ourselves 
tenderly justified in arranging all otherwise. 

Perhaps it is useless to hope that a custom so 
deeply rooted in the minds of humanity could 
be altered all at once ; but we might, at least, 
resolve to spare children the terrors we so 
solemnly inflict upon them in the matter, and, 
instead of familiarising them with all the sad 
incidents of the grave, allow them to feel that 
death, like birth, is a tender secret, and that a 
human being leaves the world as mysteriously as 
he enters it. 

August 21. 

One of the strange things about our view of 
the future life and of our relations on the other 
side of death, with others, even with those whom 



1 62 The Gate of Death 

we have loved on earth, is the feeling that we 
have of the change that will pass over them 
when they have entered the world of light. It 
seems a species of treason to think of any one 
as ill-tempered, mean, selfish, or grotesque in the 
after life, however constantly and strongly they 
may have exhibited those characteristics here ; 
and yet we love people in their entirety here; 
why should we think of them as divested of 
their individuality there? We feel, I suppose, 
that death must be a great enlightener. We 
imagine vaguely that a person after death, given 
that identity endures, will understand things 
perfectly, will see things clearly, and that the 
inevitable result will be a kind of serene balance 
of soul. I think it is a misfortune of our mun- 
dane religious system that we grow to imagine 
that persons of an ecclesiastical type of sanctity, 
of a certain definite species of piety, are dearer 
and nearer to God than secular persons. It is, 
indeed, sometimes so ; the virtues of generosity, 
ardour, sympathy, loving-kindness do, indeed, 
often blossom and bear fruit in ecclesiastical 



The Gate of Death 163 

persons ; but such persons have no monopoly of 
these qualities. And there are also faults of the 
ecclesiastical temperament, such as spiritual com- 
placency, narrowness of judgment, a tendency to 
condemn all whose beliefs deviate from their 
own — such faults, indeed, as are patently dis- 
played in the lives of typical priests, men of 
great personal purity, combined with a really 
appalling uncharitableness, faults which one 
cannot help feeling, if one reads the Gospel 
candidly, are far more repugnant, if one may 
use the words, to the spirit of Christ than 
even more gross sins. A man of base animal 
appetites may be converted, may grow to be 
ashamed of his sensuality, but a self-satisfied 
man, who is perfectly assured that he can inter- 
pret correctly the mind of God, can hardly be 
converted by any agency whatever. 

Perhaps it may be true that faults which are 
connected with our bodily natures may be to a 
certain extent extinguished by death, but I can 
only say frankly that it would be a great disap- 
pointment to me if I thought that the individu- 



1 64 The Gate of Death 

alities of those I have known and loved, and even 
of those whom I have known and disliked, were 
to be flattened out by death. I remember talking 
once to a friend who had been a very devoted 
son to a widowed mother, who lived to a great 
age. She was an acute, shrewd, incisive, deter- 
mined old lady, full of brisk and even unjust 
judgments, brimming over with delightful preju- 
dices, brave, loyal, and independent. After her 
death, her son, who, I may say, had lived much 
with his mother, and had never failed to write to 
her every day that he had been absent from her, 
since the day that he first left home for school, 
came down to see me in a condition of over- 
whelming and despairing grief. "I shall meet 
her again/ ' he said. "I don't doubt that, but 
my friends say that I must think of her as glori- 
fied, sanctified, made perfect. I don't want her 
to be made perfect; I want her exactly as she 
was, with all her faults and foibles. " 

That is the truth ; we do not want our friends 
to be levelled and smoothed out by death, the 
crooked made straight, and the rough places 



The Gate of Death 165 

plain. I do hope that the next world may 
perhaps be free from some of the things that 
pollute and poison this. I hope that filthiness 
and cruelty, malignity and spite, meanness and 
hatred may be diminished in the world of light ; 
but the essential differences of human beings, 
the differences that lie deeper than circumstances 
or education or environment, and which these 
agencies seem unable to modify — these, I believe, 
will be preserved, if the spirit is preserved at all. 
The ordinary conventional person would think it 
a kind of profanity to believe that humour will 
continue to exist in heaven, as, for the sake of 
convenience, I will call the after-life. If it does 
not, heaven will be a very dull place ; and one 
of the reasons why the ordinary idea of heaven 
is so unutterably dreary, is because all the things 
that are the spice of life, and that give it savour, 
are, as a rule, so carefully abstracted by pious 
people from their imaginary descriptions of that 
celestial place. The old idea of heaven as a 
place where the only occupation will be a per- 
petual full choral service is fortunately extinct. 



166 The Gate of Death 

We are allowed to think of it as a place where 
we shall be able, perhaps, to be happy in the 
best way ; but it is still overshadowed by a false 
atmosphere of piety and sanctity, a stifling air 
in which the natural man feels that it will be 
hard to breathe. As long as religion remains a 
monopoly in the hands of ecclesiastical persons, 
this is inevitable, and the sooner that religion 
ceases to be an ecclesiastical thing the better. 
I have myself a great affection and admiration 
for a large number of clergymen. Some of my 
best and dearest friends are in that profession ; 
but for all that I should be sorry to have to 
think that after-existence was going, so to speak, 
to be run on purely clerical lines. 

August 22. 
It may be said that it is useless to lose oneself 
in these uneasy reveries ; that one gets no further, 
indeed, that one grows more and more ineffec- 
tive, palsied with the malady of thought. " Go 
straight on/' says the robust man, " work, enjoy, 
live, do your duty, bear, act." Yes, it is excel- 



The Gate of Death 167 

lent advice ; these darker thoughts may be but a 
disease ; still, no one would ever think of telling 
a man in a fever that it was of no use to be ill. 
He knows that even better than his healthy 
mentor, and the cause of his affliction is incon- 
ceivable to him. " Man walketh in a vain 
shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain, ,, says 
the Psalm. Yes, but does one disquiet oneself? 
No one would do it willingly. There is no 
temptation to do it. But if one cannot avoid 
it, if one is brought face to face with these 
thoughts, no solution results from trying to 
believe that they are not there. The only hope 
is to gaze steadily through them, and to try and 
see a hint of brightness beyond. 

August 24. 

I sate to-day in a sheltered arbour in the garden, 
approached by a little avenue of old lime-trees, 
that looks over the churchyard. There was to be 
a funeral this afternoon, I knew, of a simple, aged 
cottager* s wife, whose pleasant wrinkled face had 
often smiled a greeting to me from her little door. 



1 68 The Gate of Death 

She was old, and had seen many things, both 
grief and joy, pain and pleasure ; she had lived a 
very quiet laborious life, had seen her children 
grow up, then her grandchildren. She had had 
few thoughts of herself , and her large heart had 
room for all about her. She loved her home, the 
quiet routine of daily life, and had preserved her 
powers intact to a great age, together with a serene 
tranquillity of mind which was reflected in her old 
worn face, on which the sleeping smile broke 
often into life. She had no warning of her end, 
and died suddenly one evening, without pain, sit- 
ting in her chair, having discharged all her daily 
labours as she was used to do. 

I saw the little procession draw near, the bell 
tolling softly in the tower. Almost the whole vil- 
lage came to the funeral, mourning for her as for a 
mother; the day itself was like the life she had 
lived — calm, cool, and still, full of kindly sun and 
bright air. I could hear from where I sate the 
words "lam the Resurrection and the Iyife," 
which I can never hear without a throb of uncon- 
trollable emotion . At last they came to the grave; 



The Gate of Death 169 

the body was committed to the dust ; the crowd 
slowly dispersed, and through the calm afternoon 
I could hear the clink of the shovel, and the earth 
falling, falling, till the grave was filled. 

It was inexpressibly sad to think of the gap 
caused by the ending of so sweet and loving a life. 
She had been one of those to whom old and young 
alike instinctively bring their troubles, though she 
was a woman of very few words ; but she listened 
with her whole heart, and the tears that filled her 
old eyes, through which she gazed with perfect 
understanding upon her confidant, had brought 
healing to many a sore heart. She never specula- 
ted about life, only met it humbly and joyfully, lov- 
ing and trusting God with a pure and glad instinct 
that made all things plain. If all lives were such 
as this, there would be little room for doubt or 
wonder; death would seem as sweet and natural 
a thing as the fading and falling of the autumn 
leaf; and yet the very dearness of that aged, loving 
spirit, the perfect sweetness of her childlike smile, 
leaves a bitter legacy of sorrow to all that knew 
her. Is it possible that we are not meant to 



1 70 The Gate of Death 

grieve ? Surely the very hiding of the secret, on 
a day like this, when there is peace and sweetness 
in heaven and earth, must contain some ineffable 
treasure of love and beauty, if we could but lay a 
hand upon it. 

And to me there comes the strange and be- 
wildering thought that, had the issues of death 
and life gone otherwise, this very day might have 
seen my own mortal frame laid to rest in the same 
place, with something of the same concourse. 
Not, alas, that I should have been mourned so 
sincerely, so bitterly. The sorrow that I have 
seen to-day written legibly in the faces, the gest- 
ures of the throng, is a purer, an intenser sorrow 
than any sorrow which would have attended me 
to my last rest. Such sorrow seems the sign of 
the one thing worth living for, and yet to be 
the gift of God, not to be attained with careful 
striving. God send us patience and faith, and, 
though we know not, the heart to live as though 
we knew. 



The Gate of Death 17 1 

August 25 and 26. 

There is one curious little delusion that tor- 
ments me in these days of enforced leisure. It 
has only lately been revealed to me what a delu- 
sion it is, but the persistency with which it recurs 
to me shows how strong a thing habit is, and 
how habit seems able to defy reason. 

The delusion is that I am so useless under 
present circumstances. One's belief in one's use- 
fulness, one's significance in the scheme of things, 
is incredibly strong ; it is rather a blessed delu- 
sion after all, and preserves one's self-respect. 
When I am in town, hard at work, I tear myself 
away from the morning paper, and sit down to 
my task with a sigh of virtuous self-sacrifice; and 
yet what is it that I do ? I write a book or an ar- 
ticle, which is perhaps read by a few hundred 
leisurely people. If I did not write my book or my 
article, I cannot really flatter myself that any one 
would be the loser. Then I answer my letters 
scrupulously and lengthily, but I do not know 
that the world would be the poorer if I did not. 

Of course, there are some professions where 



172 The Gate of Death 

one need not be in any doubt as to the usefulness 
of what one is doing. Clergymen, doctors, teach- 
ers, merchants — these are obviously useful per- 
sons; and all the people who do the necessary 
work of the world — producers of needful com- 
modities, labourers, servants, railway-men, fisher- 
men ; there can be no question about the 
usefulness of their work. But we artists, however 
strong our sense of vocation may be, what do we 
do but to amuse and entertain? The most we 
can hope to do is to help people along the road a 
little, to beguile the time innocently, to feed 
men's sense of what is beautiful and hopeful. 

Of course, that is a false way of looking at it 
after all. Men's lives cannot be spent entirely in 
useful labour ; their leisure hours must be filled as 
wholesomely as possible ; and thus the work of 
the artist is needed. Any one who supplies a 
legitimate demand is honestly employed. 

What we ought to do is not to think of our 
personal significance at all ; we ought to feel that 
we have a bit of work given us, and we ought 
simply to take care that it is as good in quality 



The Gate of Death 173 

as we can make it. Where we go wrong is in 
hankering after recognition and admiration — that 
is the temptation of the artist. 

I have been thinking about my friends and the 
value of their work. Certainly it is not those 
that are busiest who are best employed. Two of 
the most useful people in the world that I know 
are people of leisure. One is an elderly lady who 
lives in the country and has no particular duties. 
But she is a woman of great intellectual force, 
with a poetical and deeply religious mind; her 
talk, her letters are extraordinarily suggestive. 
The result is that every one who is brought into 
contact with her goes away with a heightened 
sense of the significance and interest of life. She 
is always ready to consider other people's prob- 
lems, and does it with a zest and a sympathy 
that makes it a pleasure to consult her, because 
you feel that she is instantly and generously 
interested in the case, and does her best to disen- 
tangle a situation. The result is that she holds 
the threads of many lives in her hands, and }'et I 
have often heard her say with sad humility that 



174 The Gate of Death 

she is a very useless person ; but she discharges 
for all that the work of a priestess, and, in a sense, 
of a prophetess. I,ife and the issues of life are 
to her intensely fascinating subjects of thought ; 
you leave her presence feeling that your own ex- 
istence is an infinitely beautiful and important 
thing ; she suggests motives, she kindles one with 
a desire to act worthily, she gives a savour to life, 
she is, indeed, what Christ told His disciples to 
be, the salt of the world. 

The other friend who comes to my mind is 
the parson of a small country parish ; he does 
nothing in particular ; he hunts and shoots ; but 
he brings into every society a simple and tolerant 
good-humour; he enjoys life keenly, he loves 
his fellow-men. He is the trusted friend of every 
soul in his parish, and one sees the face of every 
one to whom he speaks light up at his greeting. 
The fact that he is in the middle of his flock 
gives them a sense of real security. If they want 
to see him, he is always at leisure. In grief and 
trouble he somehow contrives to straighten out a 
problem, to give it a hopeful or a beautiful air ; 



The Gate of Death 175 

he gathers up the fragments with a careful hand, 
and shows how much is left. He is not in the 
least an intellectual person. I do not suppose he 
ever opens a book — but he is full of shrewdness, 
humour, and benevolence. He considers himself 
an indolent man ; because all the friendly offices 
he performs for his neighbours do not appear to 
him in the light of work, but as things which he 
does because he likes doing them. 

These two, and I only wish there were more 
like them, by being at leisure to be kind, by hav- 
ing a deep and instinctive interest in human 
beings, contrive to do a work, without preoccu- 
pation and without friction, which reduces the 
labours of busy, fussy people to insignificance. 

That is the temptation of work, to sacrifice 
kindly and generous intercourse with others to it. 
Yet it is just this other kind of work that I be- 
lieve Christ intended His followers to perform. 
He Himself moved a man among men, neither 
lingering nor making haste, talking, consoling, 
enlightening. He did not fling Himself into 
any occupation, or preach that men should thus 



176 The Gate of Death 

employ themselves. He rather indicated that life 
should be lived on the simplest lines ; and if we 
were only content to do that, what a network of 
small social chains and ties would be immediately 
unloosed ! 

What these weeks of enforced inactivity have 
shown me is, that we are, many of us, too much 
inclined to think that our business is to teach, 
to instruct, to guide. God, it seems, has laid a 
quiet hand on my shoulder, and bids me simply 
be a learner for a while in the school of patience 
and kindliness. I have been, I see, too much 
absorbed in trying to create, to give out, to utter ; 
and now I am ordered, for a time at least, to 
meditate, to receive, to learn. These silent hours, 
when I can do nothing but just look about me, 
reflect, talk, have a beautiful meaning for me, I 
doubt not. I try not to be querulous, not to 
complain of my limitations, not to be fretful ; I 
try to make it as much a pleasure as I can for 
any one who comes to see me to be with me. 
I try to amuse the children, to listen to what they 
are doing and thinking about ; I ask questions 



The Gate of Death i77 

about the people of the parish ; I try to under- 
stand and sympathise. I am only too conscious 
that I do not do it well — that I am self-absorbed, 
preoccupied, uneasy, in spite of my efforts. But 
I have learnt some patience, some sympathy, and, 
above all, I have learnt to realise that we ought 
not to be always trying to point out things to 
other people, but to let God point them out to 
us. I have learnt that one perceives things by 
resting, in a way in which one does not always 
perceive them by working. I have learnt that 
such hours as these fill up and replenish the 
fountains of the soul, as the spring in the valley 
is fed by the rain that falls upon the hill. God 
has been very good in not sending me suffering to 
any extent ; but He has revealed to me the truth 
that " they also serve who only stand and wait/' 
and that in all sad lives, lived some of them from 
birth to death under the same conditions of 
enforced inactivity and invalid life, there may be 
a gain of tenderness, of quietness, of sweetness, 
which may overflow in unseen and unexpected 
ways into other lives. And even if it seems to 

12 



178 The Gate of Death 

such sufferers that they can effect nothing, can 
only be burdensome to others and dreary to 
themselves, they may at least approach closer to 
the great truth, that we are more likely to draw 
near to God in helplessness and humility, than 
when we stride abroad in our pride. Like Saul 
in the ancient story, we may embark upon the 
sordid and tedious task of searching for the 
strayed beasts of burden, and may find a kingdom 
by the way. 

August 27. 

I sit here day after day in the garden, content 
just to look about me and wonder. There is a 
disreputable old man who comes in to help the 
gardener ; he is not a nice old man to look at ; he 
is not nice in any way. He used to drink ; he 
treated his wife cruelly ; his son ran away from 
home and has disappeared ; his daughter came to 
hopeless grief, and returned to find her mother 
dead and her father out of work; he has lost 
several places, partly through drunkenness, and 
partly through mere laziness. Frank, who is the 



The Gate of Death 179 

kindest of men, insists upon employing him in the 
garden, though he does no work except under 
supervision, and though it is practically certain 
that he conveys away vegetables under his coat. 
He is a dirty and shabby old wretch, with bleared 
eyes and a red nose ; he has a shy and obsequious 
manner to those above him, but he leads his 
miserable daughter a wretched life, never ceas- 
ing to taunt her with her fall from virtue ; yet he 
talks very sanctimoniously, as though he was an 
afflicted saint. 

The thought of this old man distresses me ; it 
is so hard to see why an almighty and benevolent 
God should have created and preserved a being 
like this, who has no self-respect, and sets a bad 
example in every way ; his only use in the place, 
indeed, seems to be to provide a melancholy in- 
stance of the unhappiness which results from fol- 
lowing one's own inclination. It is true that he 
has never had a chance, as we lightly say ; his 
father and mother were both drunkards, and he 
was brought up in a most wretched home. It is 
impossible to imagine him under what may be 



180 The Gate of Death 

called spiritual conditions. His idea of happiness 
is to fill his poor body with drink, stagger home to 
beat his daughter, and to sleep it off. I suppose, 
too, that he has a mild sense of pleasure when, 
after scamping his work, for which he is grossly 
overpaid, he manages to defraud Frank of a few 
potatoes or apples. It is quite beyond my powers 
of conception to forecast what will become of this 
mean and sensual old spirit, when it quits the bat- 
tered tenement of the body which he has so vilely 
abused. I do not think he has any particular 
wish to be different, and it is difficult for me to 
think of him as one of the ransomed of the L,ord 
who will return and come to Zion. Perhaps I am 
judging him as the Pharisee judged the publican; 
I am afraid I thank God that I am not as this old 
man; and yet it is with deep compassion and not 
disdain that I contemplate him, because I do not 
see that I could have done better if I had been 
born under the same circumstances. Has he in- 
deed, inside the wretched cage of bone and flesh, 
a spirit that can soar to worlds unknown ? will he 
look back upon his life here like a dark night- 



The Gate of Death 181 

mare ? will the misery and uncleanness and mean- 
ness of his life here give him a heightened joy 
hereafter ? If God is all that we believe Him to 
be, all brightness and peace and holiness, with 
what thoughts does He survey this pitiful life ? It 
is impossible to resist the thought that God might 
have done better for this old man than He has 
done. Men have been born under worse condi- 
tions than this, who have lived soberly and hon- 
estly ; but this man has never had any sense of 
shame ; he has just obeyed the impulses with 
which he is endowed, and even Frank, who is the 
most charitable man I know, says candidly that he 
never saw a man so entirely unable to see or feel 
that he has ever done wrong. Judged by all 
the canons of beauty and goodness, the man is a 
failure, and an offensive failure. If hereafter he 
can be brought to a sense of his hopeless condition, 
why should he have gone through the world with- 
out a single inkling of the fact ? His entire self- 
satisfaction is the gloomiest part of the whole 
situation. 

He suspends his work and comes up to me 



182 The Gate of Death 

simply in order to waste a little time. There is 
no one of my senses tliat he does not displease. 
He tells me that he is suffering from rheumatism, 
that he has a very hard time ; he will say nothing 
against any one, but he has been hardly used; 
a gentleman like me would hardly think how 
difficult it is for a poor man to get on. He ends 
by making a subservient suggestion that I may 
perhaps have a shilling to spare ; he is so glad 
to see me getting better ; my accident was a sad 
business. 

At this point he is called away to attend to his 
work by the gardener ; he touches his old hat 
demurely and goes off with a disagreeable smile. 
I confess that such a man is a hard trial of faith. 
There seems something radically wrong in a world 
which can nurture and guard so dismal a figure in 
the ways of sordid evil. He breaks, this deplor- 
able old man, upon my pilgrimage, as the three 
ill-favoured ones broke upon Christian. And yet 
they too had in their hearts a thought of pilgrim- 
age. The brave Christian had no misgivings. 
He rejoiced to see them led into a hole on the hill 



The Gate of Death 183 

side, a trap-door belching smoke. Perhaps if I 
were surer of my way I should rejoice too, but I 
cannot ; I would rather see my poor companion 
aroused and awakened, clad in white raiment ; I 
would like to see him pass in shrinking faith 
through the dark water ; and hear the trumpets 
sound for him upon the other side. 

August 28. 
I go sometimes, on hot afternoons, and sit 
quietly in the church. It is very cool and 
fragrant in there, and a quiet peace seems to 
settle down on the spirit. I like the ancient 
arches, with all the irregular grace of antiquity 
about them, the dusky roof, with its dark beams, 
the dimness of the chancel, the silent altar. The 
church is rich in old monuments. There is a 
fine Jacobean tomb, railed off at the end of the 
aisle. Under a marble arch, covered with little 
emblems — Time resting on his scythe, a skeleton 
turning an hour-glass in his hands, Grief dis- 
solved in tears, an Angel with a golden trumpet 
— kneel the figures of three persons. The one 



1 84 The Gate of Death 

to the left is an old physician, in black gown, 
ruff and skull-cap — Aesculapius alter, says the 
quaint inscription. Next to him kneels his son, 
a flourishing, rosy-cheeked knight, with a black 
moustache and imperial, in armour, such a cheer- 
ful fellow ! Then kneels the doctor's old wife, 
with a good, wrinkled face lowered in prayer. 
Underneath, extended at full length, lies the 
knight's lady, a pretty Puritan dame, with a 
smiling countenance, with white shapely hands, 
and tiny feet in high-heeled shoes peeping mod- 
estly from her gown. They look so united, so 
loving a party. They lived happily at the dis- 
mantled manor-house near the church. But 
sitting, as I do for an hour to watch them, I seem 
to have become almost a friend, and to have been 
admitted into the loving compact. The knight 
died more than two hundred years ago, and his 
wife did not long survive him. They lived, I 
think, very kind and honourable lives — they were 
great benefactors to this place ; the blessing of 
children was denied them. I find myself filled 
with a tender curiosity as to how the years 



The Gate of Death 185 

have passed since with them. Are they together 
again? Are they conscious of the old loves, 
the old nearness? Their bones are mouldering 
into dust in the vault beneath, the very bones 
that bore them about the fields in which I tread. 
Is it not possible to have some intuition of the 
grievous mystery ? Why have I so passionate a 
desire to know, to have an ever so faintly 
glimmering hope as to the dark hereafter ? For 
if there be none, then one should live as 
cautiously, as circumspectly as possible, hus- 
banding one's taste of joy and light ; yet even 
as that thought rises, it is checked by a deeper 
thought, that seems to say that there is something 
nobler than that. I find it hard to believe that 
if one knew that life and identity continued, 
and that love endured, one would not more 
resolutely try to lavish love and care on others. 
But I suppose that I too have Moses and the 
prophets, if I will but hear them ! And if it 
be true that self-sacrifice is the one precious 
thing, and love the thing that most endures, why 
am I so bound about by these mortal, material 



1 86 The Gate of Death 

desires and designs, so urgent, so absorbing, so 
dear? What of my ambitions, my restless la- 
bours, my longing for beauty ? Are these things 
in vain ? Why am I kept thus lingering, in 
tremulous incertitude, the prey of a hundred 
fancies, loving my toys, like a blithe child? 
If I but knew which of my hopes were the 
choice of God, could they not also become my 
choice? If I could but, like Christian from 
the Hill Beulah, even faintly discern through the 
perspective- glass, with hands tremulous for joy, 
something of the glory of the place, should 
I not betake myself with a light heart to my 
pilgrimage ? But my perspective-glass shows me 
a thousand blurred outlines, all wonderful, not 
all joyful. If God desires me to be hopeful, why 
does He send me so much that makes me 
despair? If He would have me brave, why is 
the world so full of fears ? 

August 29. 
How strange a thing it is that what we fear 
more than anything else in the world is the being 
left alone with ourselves. It is the one thing 



The Gate of Death 187 

which we cannot bear ; we try to absorb our- 
selves in thought and action, and we count those 
hours the happiest which have passed swiftly and 
unconsciously. What it seems we cannot tolerate 
is to sit alone with our own spirits. There seems 
to be hardly anything more insupportable than to 
be conscious that our minds are alert and active, 
and to be debarred from employing them. It 
generates a kind of poisonous fever of the 
spirit. We thrust ourselves back upon reminis- 
cence, or we project our restless spirit into the 
future ; what we cannot bear is the silent inact- 
ive present. 

I wonder if we ought to try and train ourselves 
more to live in quiet contemplation ; the sad thing 
is that our heart seems to have nothing to say, 
unless it is concerned with something outside of 
itself. It seems to have no consciousness of itself, 
unless it is dealing with things that are not itself. 
Here seems to lie the essential difference between 
the Eastern and the Western mind. The Eastern 
temperament seems able to exist in a passionless 
contemplation of its own essence ; the Western 



1 88 The Gate of Death 

mind exists only in strong external impressions. 
We are apt to talk about the spiritual life ; but 
what does the phrase mean upon our lips ? Our 
whole preoccupation appears to be the desire to 
become different from what we are ; to grow in 
experience and knowledge, to explore, to find, to 
realise. We are not content to be ; we desire to 
possess, and yet we are never contented with 
what we have gained. Perhaps if we dared to 
lean out more from our towers of thought, to 
listen to the silence of heaven, we should find 
the very things of which we are in search. It 
seems that we cannot let thought flow into the 
mind ; we must go out to meet it, we must drag 
it in, as a man drags in a net full of shining fish. 
Hence comes our sad disillusionment, our restless 
pain, our divided aims. Our prayer is too often, 
" Teach me to do the thing that pleases Thee." 
It is better to say, " Give me Thyself.' ' 

August 30. 

Our dread of solitude, of isolation, the difficulty 
one has in employing one's mind at all when 



The Gate of Death 189 

one is without definite resources, are in a sense 
indications of the continuation of identity and of 
relations with others after death. If, that is to 
say, we feel that life is so incomplete, so unequal 
a thing that it needs a sequel to give it signifi- 
cance at all, then we must surely feel that 
relations with other souls must be an essential 
part of the after-life. It cannot be said to 
amount to a proof ; the most that we can say is 
that life, as it is constituted, would be unintel- 
ligible without futurit} r . Moreover, the soul, 
separated from its mental consciousness, may be 
a thing of so inconceivable a quality, that its 
needs and its desires may be altogether different 
from anything we can picture with the intellect- 
ual perception. 

Left to itself, the mind seems to defy the 
will, and to wander on its own chosen track. 
One becomes conscious of a strange duality; the 
will, like a feeble charioteer, seeking to control 
the memory and the imagination, restive steeds, 
and finding itself unequal to the task. The will 
says, "I will follow out a definite argument ; I 



i9° The Gate of Death 

will make a precise subject as clear as I can." 
The mind seems to say, " No, I will run vaguely 
to and fro between the future and the past. I 
will live in the memories of the things that have 
been; I will paint pictures of what is to be." 
It is in vain that the will decides that this is a 
futile, an enervating business, and that it desires 
to follow a particular line of thought. The 
mind refuses to be bound, and, like a whimsical 
child, interrupts the course of thought with 
fanciful images, bizarre details. It recalls the 
features, the very clothes of some person long 
since dead ; it revives forgotten incidents, or it 
harps upon some petty hope, draws an elaborate 
design of future employment, future enjoyment. 
I, who have written much, find it easy enough to 
pursue a definite train of thought with a pen in 
my hand. It acts as a tiny anchor, which binds 
the wandering vessel to a fixed place. Perhaps 
one might have trained the mind to sedate 
habits ; but there is so little experience in ordi- 
nary life which assists a habit of settled con- 
templation. And thus, in vacant hours, the mind 



The Gate of Death 191 

becomes a torture to itself; it rolls and turns to 
and fro in aching misery. But the moment that 
one has the company of another human being, 
all this is at an end. The torture of the lonely 
mind is that it asks questions of itself, and can- 
not answer them ; it misses the contrast, the 
interacting influence of another thought. 

This fibre of sociability seems so interwoven 
with our natural constitution that, as Bacon says, 
only the very wise and the very brutish can dare 
to seek solitude. 

Perhaps if we are to grow hereafter in wisdom, 
we may grow more content with solitude. But 
probably there would be no doom, the imagina- 
tion of which would inspire a human being with 
a deeper extremity of terror, than the thought of 
an everlasting solitude to succeed death, a soli- 
tude in which to all eternity one could never hope 
to find oneself in relations with a kindred being 
again, never learn another's feeling, never com- 
pare experiences, never have the comforting 
thought of the proximity of one like oneself. 
The thought is indeed so insupportable that 



192 The Gate of Death 

there is hardly any fate that one would not 
choose, if only that fate could be shared by 
another. 

I think that this instinct is perhaps the very 
deepest of all ; and if we are to trust instinct as 
a guide to the nature of after-existence, we can 
affirm that it will be at all events spent in 
relations with similar yet distinct individualities. 

And if we can affirm, or at all events believe 
that, does not the hope come home to us with a 
deep conviction that we shall share our experi- 
ence, whatever it may be, with those whom 
we have learned to love on earth, even though 
we may also share it — a joyful thought — with 
spirits whom we have learnt to love and admire 
through art, through books, through the records 
of history ; congenial spirits whom we were born 
too early or too late to know? A beautiful 
dream perhaps ! But it is something more than 
a dream. 

August 31. 

How the mystery presses upon one at times ! 
Near my window grows a big yew tree, the chosen 



The Gate of Death 193 

roost of a fat and merry thrush of my acquaint- 
ance, who has done his best in the dreary days of 
my illness to enliven me with his brave rich song. 
At morning and at night-fall he used to sit on a 
high branch, his little throat swelling, meditating 
his strain, as the old poets said, repeating a pretty 
phrase twice or thrice, as though he was studying 
the effect. Some of his liquid tunes I came to 
know by heart. Of late he has seemed out of 
spirits. He deserted the high bough, and I used 
to see him sit darkling, as Milton says, in the 
heart of the bush, sometimes uttering a faltering 
note. 

Yesterday his poor wasted body lay on the grass, 
his speckled breast upturned, his tiny claws up- 
held, his bright eye glazed. I meant to ask the 
children to give my little friend a burial, and 
hide in the enfolding earth the heart so full of 
song. But the jackdaws, those decent, grave, 
scavengers of the garden, who build in the church 
tower, found him out ; plucked him relentlessly, 
and ate as much as they could of the small body. 
I did not disturb them at their ghoulish trade. 
13 



194 The Gate of Death 

Why should I deprive them of an honest meal ? 
But when they were satisfied, I asked my nephew 
to bury the poor remains, which the children did 
faithfully, and enjoyed the pomp immensely, 
devoting an old cigar-box to the purpose. 

But I am sorry my little friend is gone, and 
cannot help wondering what has become of the 
simple and bright spirit, so clearly defined, so 
happy, that has slipped away from the tiny body, 
so daintily made. 

Is this pure sentiment ? I suppose so ; and 
yet the case of the thrush, his beautiful little life, 
from the day that he broke out of the speckled 
egg and met the light of the sun, till the evening 
when he reeled dizzily off* his branch and fell 
fluttering to the ground, holds within it a host 
of strange secrets, the meanings of all of which 
are hidden from my wondering heart. Why 
should I have loved the pretty bird ? Why 
should I miss him from the dark tree? The 
strange thing, that I cannot penetrate, is why 
I should have the desire to concern myself with 
him at all. 



The Gate of Death 195 

September i and 2. 
The children here are a great delight to me. 
For a long time I was not allowed to see them ; 
then at last they were admitted to visit me. My 
nephew, Jack, aged nine, is a cheerful matter-of- 
fact young gentleman ; and, like other cheerful 
gentlemen of more advanced age, he is ill at 
ease in a sick-room. I sympathise with him so 
strongly that I should entirely understand it if 
he made excuses for not entering my presence ; 
but he is an affectionate boy, and has already a 
certain sturdy instinct for doing his duty ; so 
he pays me a solemn visit every day ; and I am 
aware that he has always prepared beforehand 
some subject of conversation which he thinks 
suitable to my secluded condition. Indeed, I 
hear from my sister that he consults her at 
intervals, "What shall I talk to uncle about 
to-day?" But my niece Marjory is quite dif- 
ferent. She is eleven years old, and she has 
the sweet tenderness of a woman already in her 
heart : that any one should be ill and helpless 
makes a direct appeal to her. I am interesting 



19 6 The Gate of Death 

and dear to her in a way that I have never been 
before ; because she can help, can give some- 
thing of herself. The difference between the 
masculine and feminine temperament is a very 
strange thing. To a boy, even to an unmarried 
man, a baby is a curious and rather disagreeable 
object ; a thing to be kept in a good humour, 
but to be banished as far as possible to upper 
rooms and perambulators. But to a girl, a 
baby in its most helpless, inarticulate and bub- 
bling stage is an idol to worship, an object 
of wonder and delight. My niece Marjory has 
found out that I like to have her with me. 
She is constantly in and out of the room. She 
delights in doing little things for me ; or she 
sits quietly, the hair falling over her pale 
smooth cheek, reading, working, but ever 
watchful. She is a beautiful child, with large 
grave eyes, full of thought, full of dreams. I 
do not think I ever realised before what an 
incomparably beautiful thing the stainless loving 
mind of a child like this is. She is a perfectly 
natural, happy, lively creature, full of interests 



The Gate of Death 197 

and little excitements. The world is a place of 
delicious surprises to her; but the intensity of 
her affections is a thing which, remembering 
my own self-absorbed, unloving boyhood, is a 
perpetual wonder to me. I recognised with 
a proud and happy thrill of the heart, the 
first time that I was allowed to see her, how 
large a share of that simple and generous love 
she lavished even on me. I knew in a way 
that the children liked me ; but Jack's anxiety 
about me in my illness had been partly that he 
was sorry that one who had been so kind to him 
should suffer, partly a kind of uneasy dislike 
of the shadow cast over the house. But with 
Marjory it was different. I saw in her smiles, 
her hardly repressed tears, that it had been a 
real and passionate grief to the child that I 
should have been so near death ; and in that 
moment a secret compact seems to have been 
sealed between us, that will last, I feel, as long 
as I live. One does not blame or praise these 
feelings or this absence of feeling in children, 
because it is so purely instinctive a thing ; but 



198 The Gate of Death 

there is a holiness, an awe about thus possessing 
the love of a child, which gives me a sense of 
the nearness and the love of God, when one 
sees a force so deep and sweet thus implanted 
by Him. 

Marjory is a clever child too, and reflective 
beyond her years. One day she was writing in 
a little paper book in my room. I asked what 
it was all about. She blushed, and was at first 
unwilling to tell me. At last it came out. 
She told me that she loved her mother more 
than any one in the world, and that her mother 
seemed to understand all that she wanted better 
than any one. " But sometimes, ' ' she said, " she 
does not seem quite to understand ; and I think 
that she is so much older that she has for- 
gotten perhaps what she thought when she was 
a little girl ; so I am putting down in my book 
exactly what I think, so that when I grow up 
and perhaps have a little girl of my own, I 
may be able to look in my book and see what 
I thought, in case I have forgotten.' ' I should 
have liked to have read the little book, but 



The Gate of Death 199 

she did not offer to show it me ; and I felt 
somehow that it was too intimate a thing to 
ask to see. 

One day I had been reading a book about 
some prehistorical remains, some old tombs and 
subterranean dwellings that had recently been 
explored in the neighbourhood. I showed Mar- 
jory the pictures, and explained them as she 
sate by me, her hair brushing her cheek, her 
hand in mine. She asked if she might read 
the book, and I told her she would find it 
dull. But for all that she wished to read it. 
The next day I looked up while she was read- 
ing, and saw that she was crying. I asked her 
what was the matter, and for a time she could 
not tell me ; but little by little it came out. 
It was nothing but the thought of these old, 
sad, helpless, half-savage people, dead and gone, 
with no one to think of or pity them ; their 
little dark houses dug up, their poor graves 
disturbed. They had found the ashes of a 
child in a tiny urn ; and the thought of this 
had been unspeakably sad to Marjory, with the 



200 The Gate of Death 

brightness of life all about her. I cannot say 
how this moved me ; and I am afraid I even 
cried myself, not so much at the thought of 
the old dead folk, though that was sad enough, 
but at the wonderful tenderness and sweetness 
of the heart of a child who could thus sorrow 
over those she had never seen, depicted so drily 
in this scientific, antiquarian book. It was like 
violets blossoming above the narrow graves, and 
drawing their sweetness from the crumbling 
ashes. I shall never forget Marjory's tears, and 
the smile that came at the thought, which I 
made for her, that they were perhaps all to- 
gether now, and smiling themselves at the 
thought of the old uncomfortable life, and at 
the puzzle that their simple arrangements were 
to learned folk. 

But ah, dear Marjory, there remains your 
loving thought of those strange ancient beings, 
who would have terrified and bewildered you if 
you had seen them in the body, and who w T ould 
perhaps have thought of you, fair-skinned and 
long-haired, as a thing more divine than human, 



The Gate of Death 201 

if they could have seen you as I see you to-day. 
Your thought, I say, seems to lift me up a step 
out of my dark reveries, and set me in a higher 
and sweeter air, a place of liberty. I felt that 
if the Father could make so sweet a thing as 
you, and set such a stainless love in your heart 
for those" who had lived and died so long ago, 
there must be a treasure of love and compassion 
in that mighty heart that transcends all that 
we can dream of, if it can overflow in such 
force and might in the heart of one of these 

little ones. 

I never fell back, after that day, into the 
same dreary chain of thought. I saw that I 
had been following reason too blindly, and not 
holding close enough to love ; and that the 
Father sent you to me that day, as a dear 
and gentle messenger of love, I doubt not. 
Even though Marjory should lay her fair head 
in the dust, her sweet spirit could lose nothing 
of its perfect purity, its unquestioning love. 
And thus, all unthinking, she opened to me 
that day a near and humble postern into the 



202 The Gate of Death 

realms of light, when I had been making a weary 
pilgrimage afar off, and beating impotently at 
pompous doorways. 

September 3. 

That is a terrible vision, recorded by Isaiah, of 
the man who comes with dyed garments from 
Bozrah, who, as he draws closer, travelling in 
the greatness of his strength, is seen to be all 
splashed and stained with the juice of the wine- 
press that he has trodden in his fury and wrath. 

There are times when some land is over- 
whelmed with dreadful catastrophes, a famine or 
a revolution, when the innocent are dying in 
agony, when it is hard not to think of God as 
appearing in this appalling guise. If it were 
only the guilty that were overwhelmed, the 
tyrant, the gaoler, the soldier, who have slain 
ruthlessly and have revelled in the miseries of 
their victims, one would feel otherwise. But 
when one reflects that these often pass through 
the crisis unharmed, when women and children 
suffer pain and atrocious indignity, when beauty 



The Gate of Death 203 

and innocence seem the most fatal of all gifts, 
it is hard to read the faintest message of hope 
or tenderness into the dreadful scroll. It is 
not as though the number of atrocities mattered 
anything. One single case of deliberate cruelty, 
like the poor child who falls a victim to the 
lust of a company of barbarous soldiers, would 
upset the most carefully reasoned scheme of 
benevolence and omnipotence. For if identity 
continues, and if memory remains, how should 
such a child, whatever life of glory might be 
in store for it, ever be able to look back to such 
a ghastly memory without shame and horror? 
What length of untroubled days, what quiring 
harmonies of heaven, what paradise of love and 
peace could ever atone for such an hour ? The 
thought is inconceivable, the problem defies the 
wisdom of the most tolerant philosopher. To 
such a one there must be some L,ethaean draught 
to erase the memory of those vile outrages. We 
treasure the tales in which beauty and innocence 
have been saved by some seemingly divine inter- 
position from dastardly wrong. But what of the 



204 The Gate of Death 

tears and anguish of those for whom there has 
been no such interposition? Do we really face 
such things when we parcel out an optimistic 
creed, when we subscribe complacently to human 
theories of Providence and God? It may be 
that no such case has come under our own ob- 
servation ; but is there any one who has had 
any experience of life that will dare to say that 
he has not encountered cases which are inex- 
plicable upon any theory of I,ove and Justice ? 
Nothing but a perfect patience and an infinite 
hopefulness can sustain us. And even so the 
ensanguined figure, upheld by his fury, with 
vengeance in his heart, seems to draw near ; " in 
His love and in His pity He redeemed them," 
says the tender prophet ; but can he repair what 
is broken, and heal the wounds his hands have 
made? 

September 4. 

There is an old picture which hangs here in my 
room which moves me strangely. I do not know 
where it came from and no one seems to know. 



The Gate of Death 205 

Perhaps it is a copy of a famous picture, but I have 
never seen it engraved. It is so old and dark that 
it is difficult to say whether it had originally any 
artistic merits. It seems to represent a place on 
the edge of a wood ; on the left are dark trees ; in 
the background rises a low hill, bare for the most 
part, with a few bushes upon it. To the right is 
a ruined building, an arch showing against the 
sky, with plants growing upon the top. In the 
centre of all is a thing which looks like a tomb — 
one can just see the edge of a cornice glimmering 
in the darkness. Beside the tomb with hands 
outstretched as if in silent entreaty, stands the 
figure of a woman in a dark robe, with a floating 
veil or scarf over her shoulders. The sky is 
faintly lit, as by a rising moon. There is hardly 
any colour left in the picture, except in the sky, 
which is a pale green ; and the ground, the foliage, 
the hill, are alike an indistinguishable brown — 
the face and hands of the woman and the marbles 
of the tomb seem of a pale ivory 3^ellow ; her 
outer robe seems to have been black, as there is 
an added darkness about her. 



206 The Gate of Death 

I think it is an Italian picture — and I have 
thought it may be meant to represent Queen Dido 
at the tomb of Sychseus. Whether it had any 
real beauty once or no, it has certainly a deep 
charm now. There is a sense of darkness and 
solitude, a hint of freshness, as of the night in 
woodland places ; a mysterious sorrow in the atti- 
tude of the figure, as of one grieving in vain for 
a beloved head. [The picture affects my fancy 
tyrannously, and thrills me with a sense of an old 
sorrow that has yet something beautiful, calm, and 
sweet about it. The leaning wood, the lonely 
hill, the uncertain twilight, touch the heart, like 
a sad music, into a tender, a yearning delight. 
How is it that an old sorrow, seen far off, has this 
strange quality of beauty about it, denied to our 
own dreary and insistent grief ? If the picture 
were a joyful one, a dance of nymphs under a 
summer shade, it would not have half the sooth- 
ing, the moving power that this old dark scene of 
solitary grief has over the mind. Some might say 
that it perhaps means that there is a blessing in 
sorrow after all ; although the only blessing that 



The Gate of Death 207 

Christ could promise to those that mourn was that 
that they should be comforted. But it is not the 
thought that the lonely figure of the mourner 
shall be refreshed and made joyful that moves me. 
It is rather the grief itself, the pain, the aching 
heart, that seems beautiful in itself, without any 
thought of what may be in store. It is so with 
music, it is so with song. As the old Greek poet 
said, men suffer and die that the tale of their sor- 
row may be sweet in the ears of those who come 
after. 

It is not so with the pain of body— the picture 
of one suffering an extremity of pain would never 
be beautiful, and would move one only with 
horror. 

I think it is because the sorrow speaks not only 
of itself, but of the love behind it, which makes 
the beauty of it. I,oss brings out the depth, the 
intensity of love ; and it is the thought of the 
love, for which the sorrow stands, that touches us. 
Sorrow purges love of all its weakness, all its 
accidents : makes it permanent and whole-hearted. 
The love that survives sorrow can never be shad- 



208 The Gate of Death 

owed any more by the things that shadow and 
weaken a living present love. My sister told me 
a story yesterday of one who was akin to us. He 
was little more than a boy, perhaps twenty when 
he died ; he lived in the house of a cousin, a 
woman, happily married, some ten years older 
than himself, whom he loved with a silent, hope- 
less love. Just when he was dying, he sent a 
message to this cousin to come and see him. She 
came, and he asked her to kiss him once. She did 
so, wondering; he said, "At last," and died 
smiling. I do not know why that story should 
move me so much, why it should appear so beau- 
tiful. It is not beautiful in spite of its sadness, 
but because of its sadness. Yet I am sure that 
what is beautiful about it is the intensity, the 
depth, the energy of the emotion it reveals. It 
gives one the hope that a thought which can out- 
weigh and resist even the terrors of death, which 
is so passionate and strong, must have an abiding 
vitality in it. and must indeed outlast death. 



The Gate of Death 209 

September 6. 

I have often wondered whether one's imagina- 
tion can create anything which is different to and 
can transcend our experience, and I think it can- 
not. For instance, the mind cannot conceive of 
colours different to any that we have seen. There 
is a curious story of a blind man who said that 
the word scarlet to him seemed to suggest the 
sound of a trumpet, which seems to show that he 
was interpreting experience, which he did not 
know except through hearsay, by experience 
which he had himself known. If one tries to 
imagine forms, say, of animals or monsters which 
one has never seen, one can only imagine a com- 
bination and an exaggeration of things which we 
have seen. Probably there are in existence, on 
other planets, forms which lie quite outside our 
imagination. There are almost certainly colours, 
j ust as there are musical notes, probably in infinite 
gradation, beyond what our eyes and ears can 
apprehend. 

One cannot, I think, conceive of a quality apart 
from material things. If one takes a colour, for 
14 



210 The Gate of Death 

instance, and tries to imagine it, one thinks of a 
thing which bears that colour, or a ray, or a 
square of the colour. I cannot imagine pure 
colour — it has in my thoughts always a kind of 
texture as well. 

So, too, I do not think we can conceive of 
virtues or sins apart from instances of those sins 
or virtues. If I think of cruelty, or liberality, I 
either see a scene which illustrates it, or at all 
events I recall a personality which possessed or 
possesses the quality. 

I sometimes wonder whether our conceptions of 
God are not limited in the same way, whether we 
can attribute to Him any but human virtues ; and 
I am disposed to think that the reason why we 
find so much in the world that is bewildering is 
because we try to put a kind of human motive 
behind it all ; whereas it is probable that God has 
qualities which we are incapable in our present 
condition of even conceiving, qualities not only 
which transcend our own, but are simply un- 
imaginable by us with our limited experience ; all 
the confusion in our moral ideas, all the impene- 



The Gate of Death 211 

trable difficulty of the world as it is, may be 
caused by the fact that things, as we see them, 
may be affected by these qualities, the very nature 
of which we are incapable of conceiving. 

I do not know that the thought is a very sus- 
taining one, but it may at least help us to suspend 
our judgment and not desire certainties. 

September 7. 
Sometimes I have a sense of a deep harmony 
in things, a strong and flowing current of love 
and peace to which I can surrender myself. 
Indeed, it often seems to me that the more I do 
this, the oftener that I dare trust this great 
and gracious influence, the more tranquil I be- 
come. Sometimes one seems beset with intoler- 
able difficulties ; one has to choose between two 
alternatives, each disastrous and painful : one 
incurs the anger and suspicion of one with 
whom one is bound to live ; one's designs fail ; 
one's efforts to do good are thwarted ; one sees 
a fellow-being, whom God has made infinitely 
dear, drifting into irreparable evil ; unbearable 



212 The Gate of Death 

calamities hang over one ; one's health is unequal 
to the strain of duties which it seems one has 
to try to perform. I^ife is poisoned at its sources 
by sin, or shame, or fear. 

Then, if one does the best of which one is 
capable, if one endures patiently, if one dares to 
resign oneself to the mighty power that sustains, 
one is sometimes floated out of one's difficulties 
by a resistless rising tide of strength and good. 
Our own efforts fail; the unexpected comes 
quietly to pass ; a silent and secret change takes 
place ; the burden is lifted by the vast force 
which we hardly dared invoke ; the great, gen- 
tle, gliding medium envelops us. As a man may 
labour in vain to drag a boat up a steep shingle 
bank until he desists in despair ; then, quietly 
flooding in, comes the great sea, so that at last 
a few gentle strokes of the oar effect in a few mo- 
ments what he has toiled through weary hours 
of aching endeavour to effect. 

And even if the sharp crisis we have so much 
dreaded draws nigh, we find that an unhoped-for 
courage and patience comes to our aid ; till we 



The Gate of Death 213 

smile to find that the agony we so shrank from is 
well within our strength to bear. 

I am sure that the secret lies here, and that 
the more we dare to trust the great force that 
moves behind the world, the more that we strive 
to glide in unison with it, the happier we grow. 
To accept the past as inevitable, to leave the 
future alone, and to live resolutely and cheer- 
fully in the present, trusting rather than deciding, 
using rather than struggling, the nearer we come 
to the heart of God. 

September 9. 

The difference between the love of God and 
the love of men seems to be this : You are 
absolutely certain that men love you, while you 
know they do not perfectly know you. With 
God you are sure that He knows you perfectly 
and you cannot be absolutely sure that he loves 
you. 

I remember, not long ago, when I was taking 
a country walk on Sunday, that I came to a little 
village church. The door was closed, and a 



214 The Gate of Death 

children's service was proceeding. I listened in 
the porch : a peevish, droning voice made itself 
audible inside, among the scraping feet, the 
coughs, the restless movements of bored children. 
"We must never forget," it said, "that God 
loves us all ; that is why He wishes to be called 
our Father.' ' 

I thought of the terrible God of my childish 
days. In the Old Testament, which we used to 
read, He seemed to be always doing fierce, harsh, 
furious things ; He was silent, invisible, severe, 
listening round corners, staring at one in the 
darkness, always ready to disapprove and to pun- 
ish, only thinking that one was well employed 
when one was attending dreary services or read- 
ing the Bible. 

Sunday, which I hated, was His day ; the rest 
of the week seemed hardly to be His concern. I 
used to wonder faintly how it was that He had 
changed His character so completely in the New 
Testament, for in the Old Testament He seemed 
only to be pleased when people did courageous 
and disagreeable things. It was no wonder that 



The Gate of Death 215 

I thought myself unfit for his company, and 
dreaded the thought of the Heaven over which 
He presided. 

It is not surprising that children so brought up 
have many things to discover about God when 
they grow older. Religion did not interest me, 
and I did not understand that God was interested 
in anything else. The Sunday frame of mind, the 
heavy dreariness of the day when all the interests 
of life were suspended, or, if not suspended, prac- 
tised guiltily, was, I thought, the only atmosphere 
congenial to Him . How can all this be remedied ? 
Some children are by nature pious and saintly, 
but they ought not to have a monopoly of the 
sense of joy in His presence. 

As one gets older, one desires more and more to 
be loved ; that begins to seem the one precious 
thing in the world, and then there comes in the 
sad desire not to be thoroughly known by those 
whom one loves, because of the fear that if they 
knew one's failures, weaknesses, timidities, gross- 
nesses, they would no longer be able to love one. 

And so the longing of the soul grows, to be 



216 The Gate of Death 

assured of the love of God: He at least knows one 
through and through. The worst need never be 
told Him, because He sees it ; our very faults and 
weaknesses are the gift of His hand. Can He in- 
deed love the pitiful creature that He has made ? 
Can one indeed go like a tired child to a father's 
knee? be pillowed in His arm, enfolded in His 
love? 

September 10. 

I have been looking to-day at a book which 
gives an account of Antarctic exploration; a finely 
written book, with an artless simplicity of narra- 
tive, which gives it all the reality and vitality that 
can only be achieved by the highest art. 

The pictures move me with a sense of the deep- 
est wonder. The frozen plain, the interminable 
glaciers, the bare broken rocks, the bleak precipi- 
ces, bare and silent, naked of life. There is some- 
thing appalling about the interminable march of 
time in these barren tracts; the falling of snows in 
the aching stillness, the slow procession of huge 
ice-falls from the mountain top, the splintering of 



The Gate of Death 2 1 7 

the black crag-faces. And all this freezing deso- 
lation, creeping, I suppose, by infinitesimal 
degrees, upon the world, as our vital heat cools. 

Yet I suppose there were ages, lost in the vast 
perspective of years, when the snows fell dumbly, 
and the glaciers crawled downwards, and the 
stones dropped from the crags in the land where I 
myself dwell. One tends to survey the world so 
wholly from the human point of view that one 
asks one's self, in a bewildered amazement, what 
can be the use of these vast regions of inanimate 
desolation. One can bear the thought of these 
cold wildernesses, if one believes that rain, and 
wind, and sun, and leaping streams are levelling, 
stone by stone, ^ese silent fastnesses, bidding 
the naked ridges sink down into the plain, to be 
covered at last with crops and the homes of men. 
And then one moves in thought through the vast 
pageant of the world ; the whirling fiery globe, 
the gathering of the waters together, the sun 
rising day by day over a boiling, steaming globe ; 
then the appearance of tropical forests, the hot 
gloom crowded with fantastic vegetation; then 



218 The Gate of Death 

the slow creeping in of the temperate cold, the de- 
velopment of animal life, till at last man appears 
upon the scene, and becomes able, strangest mys- 
tery of all, to depict in shadowy glimpses to him- 
self what the course of the world has been ; the 
size, the complexity, the intolerable variety and 
patience of the huge design! Yet every drop of 
water in those wandering seas, every crystalline 
snowflake that falls on the untrodden polar hills, 
has the same intense and awful significance. Each 
holds within itself the same amazing problem, the 
same depth of mystery. What is it all aiming 
at ? whither is it all tending ? How is it that we 
can see, by a divine intuition, all that is happen- 
ing, and guess at all that has happened, and yet 
be utterly unable to form the faintest conception 
of what is to be hereafter, of the reason of the 
whole ? No wonder that the man of science who 
sees the minuteness of our own tiny intuitions, 
and the vastness of the design that lies about us, 
loses himself in a blank repudiation of our flimsy 
interpretations of the mind of God. The only so- 
lution is to fix our minds upon nearer concerns 



The Gate of Death 219 

and direct relations. To lose ourselves in these 
gigantic and stupefying reveries merely palsies 
and terrifies the mind. And yet we cannot leave 
them out oi our reckoning if we are to hope to find a 
formula to reconcile our petty self-absorptions with 
the stupendous designs of God. But wandering 
in thought beside that ice-bound sea, with range 
after range of snow-piled summits bounding the 
furthest horizon, a deep awe falls upon my spirit, 
as I feel that not only is it not all in vain, but 
that it holds some gigantic secret, close to my 
hand, if I could but unveil it ; and there stirs in 
my soul a sweet and ardent gratitude to God for 
permitting me, so frail a creature, with so short a 
space of sun and shade to traverse, to gaze even 
for an instant into His mighty treasure-house, to 
stand even for a moment at His side, and to sur- 
vey with Him the very pulse and motion of His 
boundless heart. 

September n. 

One little story in the Antarctic book fills me 
with a sense of almost desperate pathos. Three 



220 The Gate of Death 

of the voyagers started with a train of dogs to drag 
their sledges, to penetrate as far as they could the 
frozen hills. They were reduced to very small 
rations of food, and the dogs, though willing and 
friendly enough, began to collapse and fail with 
fatigue and want of nourishment. They were 
obliged to kill them one by one. Each of the 
party in turn had to lead the dog that seemed 
most exhausted away from the camp, put him to 
death, and return with his body, which was pres- 
ently eaten by the other dogs. The poor creatures 
at last grew to understand, that when in the even- 
ing one of the sledge party left the tents accompa- 
nied by a dog, it meant a speedy prospect of food. 
And so the sad ceremony was always heralded by 
an outburst of cheerful and excited barking from 
the rest of the troop. The victim himself always 
shared in the excitement, and accompanied his 
executioner, wagging his tail and uttering joyful 
barks, under the impression that he was specially 
favoured by being led to the source of the desired 
food. The dogs never for an instant grew to real- 
ise that it was the body of a companion that they 



The Gate of Death 221 

were eating, nor did the particular dog selected for 
death ever so dimly perceive that he was chosen 
for the sinister purpose. It is infinitely pathetic 
that they should have been so intelligent up to a 
certain point, and that their intelligence should 
have yet been so limited as never to make them 
in the least suspicious about what was happening. 
I suppose it is a false sentiment, and that the pa- 
thos is thrown away ; but I confess that the 
thought of the bright-eyed furry creature, going 
so cheerfully and blithely with his assassin, with 
whom he had trudged so many an icy mile, and 
whose provisions he had so willingly carried, to 
suffer death, that his companions might prolong 
their lives, is almost unbearably sad. 

Yet pity is wasted so : perhaps the poor beast 
had a moment of fear when he found that the 
friend whom he trusted raised his hand to kill 
him, before he fell in his blood upon the snow. 
But if only one's own imagination could be so 
little exercised as that by any sad foreboding of 
death, what a load of pain would be removed ! 
And at the same time one cannot help wondering 



222 The Gate of Death 

what is the meaning of those little obscure lives 
devoted so willingly to the service of man, only to 
die by his hand ? Have we indeed a right to use 
them so ? I cannot help wondering if they were 
created with that design. 

September 12. 

" O L,amb of God, that taketh away the sins of 
the world, grant us Thy peace. ' ' What a pathetic 
cry is there ! I have been trying to think, with 
the words echoing in my mind, what they mean 
to me. 

Do I believe that the sacrifice of Christ took 
away sin in some mechanical way ? Do I believe 
that men could not go to God and be forgiven 
before Christ died? I cannot honestly say that 
I believe either. I do not see that the bitter 
fountain of sin is less lavish of its dark waters, 
since the day when He hung on Calvary. It 
may indeed be so, but nothing except unattain- 
able statistics could prove it. I cannot take it 
on trust. The black stream of impurity, cruelty, 
selfishness, still runs very swiftly through the 
world. It is lessened, no doubt, by the slow 



The Gate of Death 223 

working of the Gospel message ; there is a gain, 
an increase, year by year, of Christian love and 
courage and hope ; but that is a beautiful and 
natural process, handed on from heart to heart 
by precept, by example, even by inherited in- 
stinct. I see around me men who profess no 
belief in Christian doctrine, who yet live on 
Christian principles, who have inherited purity 
and kindness from long lines of Christian an- 
cestors. All that I readily believe. But He 
did not take away sin. 

Neither do I believe that the nature of God 
was altered by the sacrifice of Christ. If He 
is merciful and loving now, He was merciful 
and loving before ; if He was stern, vindictive, 
harsh before, He is stern, harsh, vindictive still. 
It could not be that an old and lasting resent- 
ment against man that had brooded in the mind 
of God against the creatures of His hand, was 
wiped away by the death of Christ. The thought 
is intolerable. 

And yet there is a sense in which I can say 
the words ; for I believe with all my heart that 



224 The Gate of Death 

those who can discern the nature of the Lamb 
of God, who can passionately desire to imitate 
His stainlessness, His patient love, cannot go 
back to the world after such a vision without 
some added brightness, some radiance of hope. 

But the doctrine of the Atonement, as com- 
monly understood, obscure, intricate, and even 
barbarous as it is, must be either true or false ; 
it cannot contain a half-truth. The laws of life 
and death are obscure and mysterious enough, as 
they are slowly revealed by science. It may be 
that God's outraged sense of justice required that 
a victim should suffer who had not deserved to 
suffer; but that outrages all my highest con- 
ceptions of justice too ; it insults, terrifies, and 
paralyses the soul. I am forced to inquire 
whether there is any evidence for the doctrine as 
stated, whether it is more than the shadow of a 
man's terror and bewilderment cast upon his 
religion, from the days of barbarous sacrifice, 
when he tried to appease a seeming wrathful God 
by the giving back a part of what he found him- 
self in the possession of. 



The Gate of Death 225 

I can only say honestly, that if I had reason to 
believe that the doctrine of the Atonement, as 
commonly taught and accepted, represented a 
truth, I should indeed despair of life and love 
and God. It is hard not to despair as it is : but 
that would put the coping-stone on the sinister 
structure. 

September 13. 

I have heard a man say, " If I were certain 
that identity did not endure, I should let myself 
go, and lay out my life to get as much enjoyment 
out of it as I could. " I have heard another say, 
" It is nothing but my faith in immortality that 
makes me try to do what is right.' ' I do not 
think, so far as I can judge, that these statements 
are true, though I am sure that the words were 
said in both instances quite sincerely. A cer- 
tainty of immortality or a certainty of the cessa- 
tion of identity, would, I am sure, make a great 
difference to us. But even to the strongest faith 
or to the deepest scepticism there can be nothing 
approaching a practical certainty. If we were as 
certain of either immortality or annihilation as 
is 



226 The Gate of Death 

we are certain that we shall die, the certainty 
would to some extent affect our lives — but even 
so, the certainty that we shall some day die does 
not affect our lives, our plans, or our designs, 
very much. It is not a thing which as a rule 
modifies our actions. In the absence of any 
direct evidence as to the conditions of existence 
or non-existence after death, the probability or 
possibility of either alternative cannot be a very 
constraining motive. 

When a man, then, says that, if he knew that 
identity terminated with death, he would arrange 
his life on a different plan, or that his faith in 
immortality is the one thing that makes him try 
to do what is right, I cannot help doubting 
whether the absence of knowledge or the pre- 
sence of faith would or does constitute so strong 
a motive as the speakers believe. I think that, 
as a matter of fact, the first speaker is probably 
trying, as it is, to make the most out of his life, 
and pursuing a course of action which he believes 
does tend to his happiness in this life ; and the 
second speaker would, I think, probably try to do 



The Gate of Death 227 

right even if iris faith were not so strong. Or 
rather I think that the whole thing goes together, 
and that in the one case the absence of any cer- 
tainty is as much an instinctive thing as the 
instinct which makes the man avoid the pursuit 
of immediate gratifications of sense ; and that in 
the other case, the tendency to hope for immor- 
tality, and to believe it probable, is as much 
instinctive as the tendency to try and do what is 
right. People are really guided, both in matters 
of belief and action, by temperament far more 
than by conviction ; and I do not honestly think 
that convictions shape character nearly so much 
as character shapes convictions. The man whose 
tendency it is to labour for others, to deny him- 
self, to work for a cause, would, I believe, act on 
very much the same lines whether he was Chris- 
tian, Buddhist, or Mohammedan. I do not say 
that this is wholly true, because a particular 
faith tends to emphasise certain virtues, and to 
make it easier to practise them, and because 
character is considerably affected by surround- 
ings. But I think it very rare indeed — I can- 



228 The Gate of Death 

not think of any instance in my own circle of 
friends — to find a man who, because of his con- 
victions, exercises virtues or yields to faults which 
are wholly foreign to his character. We affect, I 
believe, our descendants far more than we affect 
ourselves, by a struggle to correct a fault of 
character, just as we ourselves are far more 
affected by the virtues or the faults that we 
inherit than we are affected by rational conclu- 
sions. 

The light indeed by which we walk is within 
us, rather than outside of us ; and it is in our 
own souls that we must seek for it rather than in 
any external illumination. 

I believe that we do better, if we accept it as a 
fact, that for some purpose or other we are not 
intended to have any certain knowledge as to 
what awaits us, than if we spend our time in 
trying to catch glimpses of the unknown. Such 
evidence as there is upon the point is purely 
intuitional in any case ; and we must beware of 
trusting to human imaginations, however pure, 
ardent and hopeful they may be, in the absence 



The Gate of Death 229 

of the normal and universal evidence upon which 
our practical certainties are based. 

September 15. 

I was reading the Bible this morning and came 
upon that strange verse in the II. Chronicles — 

Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to 
reign , and he reigned three months and ten days in 
Jerusalem ; and he did that which was evil in the 
sight of the Lord. 

I have often wondered what the poor child 
did ? Whether his name was made the screen 
for the acts of some cruel vizier, while he sate 
in the royal nursery among his toys. Imagine 
the most selfish, stupid, froward, discontented 
child of that age that we have ever known. 
What should we think of the parents who in- 
scribed such a verse upon his tombstone, if the 
unhappy little creature died in his ninth year ? 

Perhaps the old chronicler only concluded that 
the little king acted abominably because he was 
carried away by Nebuchadnezzar, which could be 
held to prove the displeasure of God. In these 
old chronicles there is no nice attempt to weigh 



230 The Gate of Death 

characters ; men either did evil or they did good ; 
they never seemed to have any relapses into 
either vice or virtue. 

I once heard an intolerable clergyman take this 
poor text, and brandish it like a whip over the 
heads of little children. I could not help won- 
dering what he was doing in the sight of the Lord. 

But granted that Jehoiachin was an evil, spite- 
ful, selfish child, whose fault was it? These 
natures that one sometimes encounters, perverse, 
malignant, cruel from the beginning, how they 
disorder one's belief in providence in God ; for 
that is the misery of the position. If one could 
believe that God had ever made a wholly worth- 
less and evil being, a source of pure misery to 
itself and others, He is either not omnipotent or 
not benevolent. 

September 18. 
There is a monument, a mural tablet, in the 
church here, about a hundred years old, the quiet 
record of what must have been a terrible tragedy. 
It records the death of three sons of a former 
vicar. The eldest died at the age of tw^enty-five. 



The Gate of Death 231 

In the following year tlie second son died at the 
age of eighteen, and in the year after that the 
third son died at the age of sixteen. I cannot 
find out anything about these poor people ; but 
it is hard to feel from the point of view of either 
the parents or the boys themselves that the story, 
whatever it was, can indicate a merciful, loving, 
or probationary design. It seems a hopeless 
tragedy, and if I were told to invent a fiction, 
leading up to and following from these events, 
which should exhibit the providence of God in 
a hopeful and beautiful light, I should find it 
an impossible task. The most that one could 
do would be to draw a picture of faithful and 
tender resignation under an overwhelming ca- 
lamity ; and as for the death of the three sons 
at so early an age, I could only depict it as either 
terminating blameless lives, and accepted without 
repining, or as removing them from the shadow 
of inevitable affliction, from a world with which 
they w r ere unfitted to contend. The tragedy of 
the circumstances haunts me, a tragedy enacted 
in these very rooms in which I now live. 



232 The Gate of Death 

It may be said that it is morbid to consider 
so closely the circumstances of a calamity in 
which the actors are unknown to me ; that if 
I look round at the other memorials of the dead 
I shall find abundance of testimony to long and 
prosperous lives ; and that the average duration 
of life and the average distribution of happiness 
should rather be considered. 

But this solution does not help me, for the 
simple reason that we human beings are each 
given a separate individuality and a separate 
consciousness. The solution, whatever it is, 
ought to be true for every individual case and 
not only for the majority of cases. If the Crea- 
tor of men is indeed all-powerful and all-loving, 
each single being He creates ought to enjoy 
his own personal hope, ought to have enough 
light to meet the problem that confronts him, 
enough evidence to convince him that he is 
the object of the Father's tender care. To 
merge our individual consciousness in the con- 
sciousness of the race, to reflect that there seems 
to be in the world a certain element of pain and 



The Gate of Death 233 

failure, to console ourselves with the thought that 
by having to bear an excessive share of suffering 
we are perhaps lightening the general load a little, 
is a lofty, noble, and philosophical position ; but 
it requires an amount of unselfishness and an 
amount of intellectual imagination which makes 
it a perfectly impossible position for young, frail, 
unimaginative, simple people to adopt. One 
ought to be able to assure, say, a boy condemned 
to suffering and an early death, perhaps through 
no fault of his own, that there is a destiny in 
store for him which, if he could fully realise it, 
would make him accept his doom willingly and 
even joyfully. But can we do this ? Alas, the 
most we can say is that in darkened heart and 
bewildered brain there yet lurks a hope that it 
may even be so. To regard such a tragedy, as 
the one recorded on that marble slab, as fortuitous, 
is intolerable ; to regard it as merciful and bene- 
volent is well-nigh impossible. The only direc- 
tion in which our hopes can turn is in the 
direction of believing that the design of God 
is so vast and so august, that these seeming 



234 The Gate of Death 

anomalies will ultimately appear of so minute a 
character that they will not only not bewilder 
us, but will fall into their places in a gigantic, 
a stupendous plan, which will satisfy us beyond 
our deepest hope. But in dreary and uncom- 
forted days, when the pain is so near, so urgent, 
and when the hope lies so remote, and the way 
thither so beset with countless obstacles, God, 
if He be what we believe Him to be, must surely 
have some strangely beautiful purpose in view if 
He can so guard from us the hope that would 
make these things bearable. 

As it is, I can hardly dare to picture to myself 
the stupefied agony of the poor household, when, 
after the death of the first-born, the fear begins 
to beckon on the horizon that the life of the 
second son must be surrendered ; and then, when 
that too is over, and disease again creeps nearer, 
laying its hand upon the boy that yet remains ; 
and then when he too is laid to rest, and the 
parents are left in cheerless solitude, with nothing 
but a memory of the sweet past, how hard a task 
to believe it even a duty to bless the name of 



The Gate of Death 235 

the Lord who gives and takes away, when other 
homes are musical with children's voices and 
busy with all the dear cares of household life ! 

September 21. 
Mr. Yeats, in a beautiful essay on William 
Blake, which I have been reading, says that in 
Blake's time " educated people believed that they 
amused themselves with books of imagination, 
but that they ' made their souls ' by listening to 
sermons and by doing or not doing certain 
things/ ' "In our time," he goes on to say, 
"we are agreed that we ' make our souls' out 
of some one of the great poets of ancient times, 
or out of Shelley, or Wordsworth, or Goethe, or 
Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy in the 
books he wrote before he became a prophet and 
fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's 
pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or at best 
make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to ser- 
mons, or by doing or not doing certain things. 
. . . No matter what we believe with our 
lips, we believe with our hearts that . . . 
when time has begun to wither, the Divine 



236 The Gate of Death 

hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vul- 
garity. " 

That is a fine idea, beautifully expressed, and 
represents perhaps the consummate essence of 
the hope of those who live in and for art. 

But what I long to ask the author is where 
the conviction comes from that he here gives 
voice to. He sets aside the ethical and the 
so-called religious solutions of life, and falls back 
upon the artistic solution. I suppose he would 
reply that it was an intuition so intense that it 
had for him the force of a conviction. But what 
I desire is sufficient evidence of the truth of this 
intuition which would make me inclined to move 
in the direction of the solution which he indicates. 
There is no doubt that there are certain natures 
born into the world over whom beauty has so 
sweet and so constraining a power, that they 
believe by intuition that the essence of the nature 
of God is beauty. But these natures are rare ; 
and there is no sign that they are becoming very 
much commoner. There are people too in the 
world whose intuitions are just as strong, that 



The Gate of Death 237 

the solution of the problem of existence will 
prove to be an ethical one ; and these people are 
as sensitive to the beauty of virtue as artists to 
the beauty of art. But there is a far larger class 
of people whose intuition is just as strong that 
the end cf existence is prosperity and material 
enjoyment ; and all these three classes have a 
certain amount of evidence which justifies them 
in regarding the objects and the thoughts which 
they so ardently pursue as being at all events a 
part of the design of God. 

What I miss in the utterance is a certain large 
tolerance, a belief that God appeals to people 
in very various ways. To announce a conclu- 
sion with the certainty which Mr. Yeats deals 
in is surely to place himself among the prophets 
rather than among the poets, a function which 
he regards as an inferior one. The statement 
indeed appears to me as dogmatic and as un- 
reasonable as the old orthodoxy. If one looks 
close at life, the only things which natural law 
seems to punish are carelessness and excess : it 
derides innocence and beauty ; it attacks the 



238 The Gate of Death 

purest and sweetest character with what looks 
like a deep injustice, if a parent or grandparent 
has violated the law of temperance. No amount 
of personal virtue, no amount even of good taste, 
saves the unhappy descendant of vicious persons 
from bearing the burden of their sins, even when 
they did fiot have to bear the burden of them 
themselves. Viewing the position indeed from 
the philosophical standpoint, it may be said that 
human beings have actually to combine together 
to save themselves from the blind working of the 
forces of God ; and in the religious region, they 
have similarly to combine together to encourage 
each other to believe in the justice and holiness 
of His nature, when an afflicted individual cannot 
discern it. 

Mr. Yeats goes on in a noble passage to say 
that eve^thing that lives is holy, and that 
nothing is unholy except things that do not 
live, such as cruelties, he adds, and other forms 
of vice. " Passions,' ' he says, "are most holy 
because most living, and a man shall enter 
eternity borne on their wings." 



The Gate of Death 239 

But this position, again, though it has much 
that is lofty and dignified about it, is equally 
unphilosophical. Some of the things that war 
most implacably against virtue and beauty alike 
are things, like disease, lower instinct, crime, 
which have a terrible vitality of their own. 
"Mine enemies live and are mighty" said the 
Psalmist, and it is none the less true to-day. 
Even passions themselves are destructive things, 
and it is true that Mr. Yeats includes personal 
passions in his thought, and does not only mean 
large and generous enthusiasms, patriotism, vir- 
tue, unselfishness, noble indignation. 

That is the most terrible part of the problem ; 
that the mighty force, that moves behind created 
things, seems to be arrayed upon both sides of 
the battle ; it urges us through nature and in- 
stinct to be cruel, indolent, selfish, timid. It 
bids us, on the other hand, to be noble, kind, 
peaceable, courageous. The difficulty is to de- 
cide which of these urgent voices to obey and 
follow, which to disregard and to resist. The 
victory lies not in the reckless following of 



240 The Gate of Death 

generous impulses, the pursuit of attractive vir- 
tue, but in a wise and tranquil balance of soul ; 
instinct and reason, unequal companions, must 
make common cause, just as the lame man and 
the blind man in the old story fared together 
on a pilgrimage which either separately could not 
have attempted ; the blind man carrying his lame 
companion, lending legs and borrowing eyes. 

Septemebr 22. 

I have said, I see, very little of Frank in these 
pages, and yet he has been unwearyingly, end- 
lessly kind. He has really made me feel as though 
it were a joy and delight to him that it is his house 
that I should be ill in, with all the expense and 
trouble it entails. He has been consistently 
hopeful and cheerful, and there has been no pre- 
tence about it all ; I do not suppose that a single 
thought of inconvenience has ever crossed his 
mind. He comes to see me constantly, bringing 
with him the brightness and serenity of a per- 
fectly strong, affectionate character. 

And yet I have not been able to say a single 
word to him on the subjects which have been 



The Gate of Death 241 

most in my mind ; to him it is all simply meta- 
physical speculation, not so much a temptation 
of the evil one, as an unhappy burden that 
such temperaments as mine have to sustain. It 
makes him more tender, more compassionate, 
more devoted. Frank has never the least doubt 
or difficulty. His theory of life is a simple 
one ; it is that one must believe what one is 
told, not set up one's judgment against the 
accumulated wisdom of the world ; that it will 
be all right somehow and somewhere, and mean- 
while one must just help people along to the best 
of one's ability o 

A pure and noble faith ! made possible by 
inheritance from old and joyful saints, joined 
to a perfectly temperate, wholesome, balanced 
nature, untroubled by the malady of thought. 
Yet I do not envy Frank his certainties — miror 
magis. If there were more people like him, the 
world would be a happier and a simpler place. 
Yet he does not shut his eyes to difficulties; he 
looks, and they do not seem to him to be there. 
He lives, I think, almost purely by instinct. 



242 The Gate of Death 

Yet he is a man of ability, interested in books, 
appreciative. He has no critical faculty ; when 
people do what he thinks wrong, he does not 
blame them — he is sincerely sorry for them. 
He believes in God ; he believes in the devil, 
though he would call it the personality of evil ; 
but he has no desire to know how things came 
about — it is enough that they are there. 

It does me good to be with him, and I love 
him as well as I know he loves me. How 
strange he would think it if he knew that with 
all my love and admiration for him, the thought of 
his existence, his splendid certainty, his vigorous 
faith, his unresting energy, does but deepen the 
impenetrable mystery of being which continues 
to haunt my i^ind. 

September 24. 

I had a curious talk yesterday with an ener- 
getic and able clergyman of the neighbourhood 
who came in to visit me. He was deploring 
the lack of conviction in the world at the pre- 
sent time, and he said that the reason why men 
were so often ineffective was because they were 



The Gate of Death 243 

uncertain. He added that we should have had 
no Reformation from the teaching of Erasmus ; 
it arose from the intense convictions of Luther, 
though his was a much more limited personality 
than the personality of Erasmus. 

I said that I thought that at the present time 
certainty was a thing which it was increasingly 
difficult to attain ; that the old religious cer- 
tainties were shown by science and historical 
criticism to be impossible ; but I added that I 
believed that gain must result from the process ; 
it could not be that the more one diverged from 
truth, the more effective one became. 

He seemed dissatisfied with the conclusion, and 
inclined to think that an irrational certainty was 
a diviner thing than a rational uncertainty. He 
said it was all a kind of agnosticism, and said 
that it grieved him to find that the margin of 
permissible agnosticism seemed to him to be 
increasing every day in religious regions. 

It is certainly true, I reflected afterwards, that 
the more we know of God through studying 
nature, the more uncertain we become about 



244 The Gate of Death 

Him. Our forefathers, for instance, believed 
that the Old Testament story, the dealings of 
God with the chosen race of Israel, was all a 
record of actual facts. But nowadays there are 
many perfectly sincere clergymen who practically 
do not believe the miraculous element of the 
Old Testament ; who no longer hold that Moses 
brought the decalogue down from a mountain, 
written on tablets of stone by the fingers of 
God ; who do not believe that He suggested the 
sacrifice of Isaac, or that He recommended the 
extermination of heathen tribes. They frankly 
believe that much of what is represented as the 
advice and counsel of God was human policy, 
enshrouded, for diplomatic reasons, in super- 
stitious reverence. They do not really believe 
that on a certain day Elijah called down the fire 
of heaven on his altar, when the priests of 
Baal were unable to do the same ; or that Moses 
disseminated plagues in the land of Egypt, and 
that the sea stood up like a wall on either hand 
to let the Israelites go through. 

It is this that makes the position of our clergy 






The Gate of Death 245 

so extremely unsatisfactory ; that they are still 
bound to give a formal assent, and to preach the 
truth of records in which they do not wholly 
believe. 

What will emerge from, what will survive this 
inevitable rationalism is hard to say. But for 
all brave and truth-loving people the path is 
clear. We must accept no religious statement 
of truth, unless reason and experience to a certain 
extent confirm it. The one thing that seems to 
defy the solvents of rationalism is the personality 
of Christ ; it may be surrounded by unhistorical 
legends, but nothing can take away the wonder 
and sublimity of His teaching and of His ex- 
ample. We may ransack the records of humanity 
in vain for such a figure, such a life, such a con- 
ception of moral virtue. It is a supreme instance 
of a superhuman intuition, confirming its con- 
clusions by reason and experience. 

And yet how simple was His discovery, if it 
may reverently be so called. To take the highest, 
strongest, sweetest emotion of humanity, and to 
identify that with God. He did not say that 



246 The Gate of Death 

God was loving, but that God was I^ove. Could 
a mere man have seen that, have said that ? I 
do not think so. And on that rock my faith 
is built. 

September 25. 

Murray, our squire, called to see me to-day; 
an excellent fellow for whom I have a cordial 
respect and liking ; sensible, good-humoured, 
kindly — exactly the type of man who is turned 
out by scores from our public schools ; and, 
moreover, exactly the sort of man whom a 
perfect competitive examination would select to 
be a squire, if they examined for such posts, as 
they do in China. 

Unfortunately, he brought with him a cousin 
of his, Iyord B. , whom I have met before, and 
whom I have the misfortune to dislike. L,ord 
B. was at Eton, where he was a humble and 
obscure sort of boy ; he could not play games, 
he was no good at his work, and no one paid 
him the least attention. At home he was 
brought up by an indulgent widowed mother, a 
silly woman, daughter of a Duke, with a strong 



The Gate of Death 247 

sense of her importance. He was at Oxford at 
the same time as myself, but I did not know 
him there ; he belonged to a sporting set, and 
was eventually sent down for a rather dingy 
business, wrecking the shop of a small trades- 
man, or something of the kind. Since then he 
has done nothing in particular. He is not 
married ; he is enormously wealthy ; he neither 
shoots nor hunts ; he goes to some race-meetings, 
and he has a set of rather vulgar friends, who 
stay with him, and, I suppose, amuse him. He 
is tall and thin ; he has an aquiline nose, a 
short forehead, very little chin to speak of ; and 
large, hard, luminous eyes. He looks about him 
in a way that I can only describe as insolent, 
as if he wondered to what strange and low place 
a man of distinction had been brought. He is 
polite without being courteous; he says very 
little, and indeed he has very little to say. His 
conversation at his own house mostly consists of 
personal remarks on the behaviour and appear- 
ance of his friends, followed by a tittering laugh. 
I cannot think why Murray tolerates him ; but 



248 The Gate of Death 

Murray would never ostracise any one, and says 
that B. is n't really a bad fellow when you know 
him. 

I may, of course, be judging him hardly, but 
I confess that I think that he cumbers the earth. 
He has a strong and complacent sense of his 
wealth and rank, and despises rather than pities 
people who do not possess the same advantages. 
I feel sure he is a selfish and heartless fellow, and 
probably capable of cruelty ; also he is physically 
a coward. If he were a poor and undistinguished 
man he would cringe to his superiors, and bully 
his wife and children. It is very difficult to get 
him to do anything for the people on his es- 
tate, and he takes no trouble whatever to know 
them. 

The curious problem is why so many of the 
things that people agree to think desirable 
should be lavished on this man ; and he is a 
happy man too, because he thoroughly enjoys 
the consciousness of being a magnate. It is a 
humiliating fact that probably nine out of ten 
people would willingly change places with him, 



The Gate of Death 249 

and there are abundance of pleasant girls who 
would not hesitate to marry him. He will prob- 
ably live to a great age, because he is a healthy 
fellow and takes great care of himself. If he 
lives to be eighty he will have received in the 
course of his life a good deal over two millions 
of money, of which he will not willingly have 
spent a penny upon any one else. He will 
have lived for many years in an ancient house 
which is a dream of beauty, a palace full of 
treasures of art, standing in exquisite gardens. 
He will have lived in honour and respect which 
he has never earned. No one will regret him 
for an instant. Meanwhile the heir to his hon- 
ours and estates, if he does not marry, is a 
really fine fellow, a hard-working politician, 
with strong views about social reform. 

There seems something strangely awry about 
the whole business. What B. needs to make 
a man of him is humiliation, toil, disappoint- 
ment on the one hand — and on the other, 
generosity, affection, and unselfishness. The 
theory that life is a probation seems to crumble 



250 The Gate of Death 

to pieces before such an existence as this, because 
this shallow, insolent, complacent little soul 
seems to be put in exactly the position to de- 
velop all his worst qualities, to be persuaded 
daily, by all the resources of humanity, to think 
himself great, magnificent, and important. What 
is the use, one is tempted to ask, of fooling 
such a man to the top of his bent ? if there is an 
after-existence, it must be a time of crushing 
disillusionment. Surely the process, whatever it 
is, could be done more simply. Of course, it 
may be said that one should not think so much 
of material conditions, that one should feel that 
God's concern is with the soul, and not with its 
worldly environment. But if so, why is the 
instinct so deeply and widely implanted in human 
nature, to value so highly the trappings of wealth 
and consequence? Most people envy B., and 
very few contest his perfect right to enjoy his 
advantages. Such a man as B. does make one 
feel that the world is out of joint, and shakes 
one's confidence in the morality that is preached 
from a thousand pulpits, because B. is an un- 



The Gate of Death 251 

deniably fortunate and happy man, and does 
not deserve to be ; even if disaster were now to 
fall on him, he will have had twenty years of 
complacent enjoyment of some of the best things 
that the world can give ; and if, as I say, he is 
to be hereafter disillusioned, it seems a needless 
cruelty to have surrounded him with such elabo- 
rate illusions here. 

September 28. 

Lord B.'s visit has set me thinking about the 
parable of Dives and I^azarus ; it is surely a very 
curious, very socialistic story. 

Dives is not depicted as a cruel, vicious, or 
selfish man ; indeed, he is the reverse, because in 
his torment he thinks of his brothers, enjoying 
themselves peaceably in the upper world, and 
begs that the sad truth may be revealed to them. 
Neither is I^azarus represented as a benevolent or 
affectionate person ; he is deeply afflicted, but he 
tries in the story to get what enjoyment he can, 
even though it is only to munch the broken meats 
in the sun. The torment and the refreshment 
seem to be given to the two in the after- world, 



252 The Gate of Death 

simply in order that their positions may be re- 
versed. One who was made rich by God is tor- 
tured for having been rich ; one who was made 
poor and diseased by God is comforted because 
he was poor. One feels bound to take for granted 
that Dives was vicious and cruel, and that L,azarus 
was patient and virtuous; but Christ never says 
a word to indicate that in the story. And then, 
too, there is a horrible sternness about the answers 
of Father Abraham : " They have Moses and the 
prophets, ' ' he says ; * * let them hear them . ' ' What 
are they to hear them say? Moses and the prophets 
never say that it is wrong to be rich, but rather 
that prosperity is the natural reward of virtue ; 
and they certainly give no hint of an after-exist- 
ence, in which the possession of wealth is sternly 
chastised, and poverty is compensated. The un- 
happy Dives thinks that perhaps a great shock, 
the return of some spirit from the after-world to 
warn his brothers, might have an effect. But 
Abraham says they will not be persuaded even by 
that. Persuaded of what? That they should 
divest themselves of their wealth, and betake 



The Gate of Death 253 

themselves to poverty and sickness, in order that 
they may win a reward ? 

Is it not strange, too, in passing, that Christ 
should give, in the story, to the man who may 
not be sent back to the world of men, the very 
name of the one man who was so recalled ? 

And yet there is a solemnity, an authenticity 
about the parable, which makes one feel that it is 
a very real dictum of Christ's. It cannot be said 
that the details ought not to be pressed, because it 
is one of the very few statements of Christ in which 
He deliberately drew aside for a moment the veil 
of death. I find it hard to believe that it is not 
a deliberate utterance ; and yet, in the absence of 
any moral condemnation of Dives or any moral 
approval of Lazarus, I find it very hard to feel 
that the punishment of one or the reward of the 
other has any semblance of justice about it. It is 
true that the utterance may have been imperfectly 
recorded ; but yet, on the other hand, it is given 
with a fulness of dramatic detail which makes one 
feel that one here gets very near to the words of 
Christ. The lesson does not seem to be that one 



254 The Gate of Death 

must use wealth well or bear poverty patiently ; 
but that the possession of wealth in this world 
seems to entail dreadful consequences in the next 
world, while to be poor and diseased in this world 
is an earnest of future happiness. I am unable 
to disentangle it. 

October 3. 

I am growing stronger every day. I write less 
in my diary, because I am living instead of think- 
ing. Each day is so full of sweet and fragrant 
impressions that I cannot make any choice among 
them. I seem to have no wish to record them; 
it is enough to experience them. 

The summer is over ; the trees are splashed and 
streaked with gold ; the flowers die one b3^ one. 
Yet every day seems rich in new surprises. I 
seem never to have seen these things before ; yet 
I have been always observant, a careful gatherer 
and noter of impressions, to use them, God for- 
give me, to adorn my books. I feel as if I should 
never have time to write again, in a world where 
there is so much to see and love. Before, there 
was an irreparable regret about the fading of sweet 



The Gate of Death 255 

things ; now each hint of change, if it is only the 
change of death, seems full of a vast significance. 
Each day that passes seems perfect in itself, 
whether the sun shines golden on the tangled 
garden, or whether the sullen skies weep their 
laden stores away. There seems a mighty spirit 
abroad ; not the prodigal spirit of summer, lavish- 
ing life and bloom, but a stronger, sterner spirit, 
graver, too, and sweeter, that sits musing in the 
short twilights among the rusted leaves. 

October 7. 
At one time my journalistic work used to 
necessitate my spending a month in a local 
centre. I used to shut up my rooms in I/mdon, 
and take lodgings in a quiet country town, where 
I was in charge of a branch establishment, while 
the sub-editor took a holiday. I had some friends 
there, and invariably enjoyed it. Yet I used to 
leave town with a dreary sense of banishment 
and discomfort, my habits interrupted, my plan 
of life disordered. The very same process used 
to take place upon my return to London. I used 
to leave my country lodgings reluctantly and 



256 The Gate of Death 

unwillingly. I used to picture to myself the dis- 
agreeable side of the London life, the intricate 
relations with people, the din, the hurry, the 
pressure. Yet after I had been in London a 
week, I used to feel that it was the only place 
where I cared to live. 

It is a curious thing how deeply rooted this 
instinct is in human nature ; because though I 
knew perfectly well in London that I should find 
my month in the country pleasant, and though 
I was quite aware in the country how much I 
enjoyed the London life, yet the certainty never 
brought the slightest comfort. 

It is an allegory of what we all feel in the 
back of our minds about death — the suspension 
of the familiar activities. But the strange thing 
again is that the inherited instincts of humanity 
never seem to bring any alleviation of the trouble. 
If there is one thing certain, it is that life is brief 
and insecure ; that we have no continuing city ; 
and yet there is this deep sense of a desire for 
permanence ; the wish to keep things as they are ; 
to abide in the familiar. Even the most adven- 



The Gate of Death 257 

turous spirits, who love change of scene, and ex- 
ploration, and even danger, shrink back appalled 
from the thought of death. The bewildering 
thing is that the Power that made us should 
have placed us in a sphere where tranquillity 
and security are impossible, and yet should have 
endowed us with the intense desire for both. 
Stranger still that the accumulated experience 
of mankind, through centuries of inheritance, 
should not have come any nearer to acquiescing 
in the uprooting and transplanting of ourselves 
from life. It is impossible to see how this 
anomaly can tend to our ultimate happiness ; and 
yet the conviction of ultimate happiness survives 
even this constantly apparent evidence to the 
contrary. 

October 12. 

I have often read in books of the joys of con- 
valescence, but they are sharper and sweeter than 
one could have conceived. 

Day by day I grow in strength. I can walk an 
hour or two without fatigue ; the perception of 
the sounds, the scents, the lights of earth seizes me 



258 The Gate of Death 

with ineffable delight. I could almost have shed 
tears to-day at the sight of the red breast of a 
robin that came pecking round me, and at his 
shrill, comfortable note. The very savours of 
food have a poignancy that I have never felt 
since my childhood. The cool, white linen of my 
bed, as I settle myself after a happy day into a 
delicious weariness, gives me exquisite delight. 
Everything that I see or do or hear seems to have 
a rich and sweet significance. A glance, a lifting 
of the eyes, the touch of a hand, a word falling 
from one of my dear ones, gives me a thrill of 
pleasure. I seem to have been washed clean 
and pure by my long rest, and given a new 
heart. 

I have not written in my diary for some days; 
it is because the actual simplicities of life have 
been so absorbing that I had no time to re- 
flect, and yet, when I read the pages, with their 
tremulous record, I do not feel that there is any 
morbidity about it; it is as true as when it was 
written. All those uneasy thoughts, those dark 
mysteries, are there; only just now, with all the 



The Gate of Death 259 

radiance of the new life about me, I have no 
leisure to think of them. 

I am to go away in a few days. I always dis- 
like moving ; I dislike breaking up a dear group, 
changing my environment, adopting a new way 
of life. But I am too full of a serene happiness 
to vex myself over it. I am to go down to the 
sea for a month, and I have persuaded Frank to 
let me take the children with me, who are wild 
w 7 ith delight. Indeed I find myself looking for- 
ward to it with the delight of a child. 

I am by no means well yet. I have dizzinesses, 
little failures of power, breathlessness, weakness. 
But they diminish daily; and so strange and 
transfiguring a thing is the physical well-being 
which throbs through me, that they are not even 
unpleasant in themselves. I seem to be content 
whatever I am doing. If I cannot walk, I can 
sit and read; if I cannot read, I can look about 
me ; I can even sink into sleep with a sense of 
delicious surrender. 

Indeed, I seem to have become a child again — 
and aware of a fact of which I had not been 



260 The Gate of Death 

hitherto aware, namely, of how much my phys- 
ical constitution had altered since my childhood. 
I always felt the same ; but now there is an 
active joy, a swiftness of recuperation, an acute 
sensibility to small sensations which my life had 
lost. 

October 14. 

I am going away to-morrow; my things are 
mostly packed — the things that I brought down 
here so many months ago for what I expected to 
be a short visit. Then it was winter; now it is 
autumn ; the spring and the summer have gone 
very strangely for me, and I feel separated from 
my old life as by a deep trench of experience — 
though even now the intermediate experience 
seems to be fading, and the old life begins to flow 
into the new. 

And I have been through the darkest experi- 
ence known to man — no, not the darkest, because 
I have not had to face hopeless suffering. I have 
suffered very little, so far as pain goes ; but I 
have twice been certain, as far as one can be cer- 
tain, that I was going to die; twice I lost my hold 



The Gate of Death 261 

of life, and only waited for the end ; twice I 
climbed back to life. What have I gained from 
it all ? To-day I can hardly say, because I seem 
to have been born again ; a new life runs 
strongly and evenly through my veins; and the 
joy of that is so intermingled with my thought 
that it is hard to disentangle it ; hard to discern 
whether I have gained anything that will not 
desert me when the dark days come again to me, 
as sometime they must. 

Have I lost my fear of death? I cannot 
say. To-day life and death alike seem beautiful, 
charged with sweet secrets, musical with dreams. 

What of my faith, my religion? To-day again 
that seems to have become a simpler, freer thing, 
not a hope mixed up with knowledge, a strange 
hybrid, compounded part of history, part of 
philosophy, part of moral effort. To-day it 
seems a kind of close kinship, a nearness of 
spirit, an attitude. There seems a Person behind 
it all to-day, who sees, listens, approves, loves. 

And yet I am less certain of what my faith is 
than I ever was before ; my old doubts, doctrines, 



262 The Gate of Death 

beliefs, seem like the noise of a far-off city, to one 
who is speeding into quiet fields, full of sunset 
light. My former difficult, complicated system, 
when compared with my new lightness of heart, 
seems like the study of anatomy compared with a 
consciousness of youthful strength . In one sense 
I feel more certain than ever, because something 
seems to breathe and stir behind the curtain of 
mystery, which I now no longer desire to lift. 
Before I seemed like a child who lifts the corner 
of a window-blind, and sees the blackness of 
night outside. 

I said somewhere in my diary that faith ought 
to be a lively hope, with the first few steps of 
the onward path discerned by reason : that is 
what I feel to-day ; the hope is mine, and the 
path is there ; all I seem to have discarded is a 
fanciful map of the way. 

And yet I do not know how much of this 
bright intuition that dwells with me is the con- 
sequence of physical health. Probably much of 
its pulsing radiance is the result of my having 
had what I have not known for years — a long 



The Gate of Death 263 

rest. This stock of vigour that seems to have 
been quietly accumulating will not last for ever ; 
I shall be weary, and unstrung, and forlorn 
again, I w^ell know. But it will not all leave 
me. I have drawn nearer to the central forces 
of the earth ; I am like a man who has lifted 
a stone from the ground, and seen a hidden 
stream running swiftly under dark arches. I 
have drawn nearer to love. These dear ones 
here whom I thought indeed I loved before — 
their lives were outside of mine, and now they 
seem intermingled. It is not only that our lives 
have touched, day after day, that I have been 
dependent on them in my helplessness as I was 
never dependent on human beings before — it is 
something different from that ; a tide of emotion, 
a secret current runs between my soul and theirs. 
And yet I am not sure of immortality ; I am 
not sure of any continuance of personal identity. 
If I were to answer questions sincerely to some 
inquisitive person who examined me in my faith, 
I should reply that I did not know, to many 
questions which a few months ago I should 



264 The Gate of Death 

have answered stupidly and irritably in the 
affirmative ; and yet there are some parts of my 
belief — in the Christian sacrament, for instance— 
which are richer and fuller than ever before, 
because through it there seems to flow some- 
thing of that moving tide of love which bears 
us on its bosom as it sets to unknown shores. 
God, Christ, the Spirit, these are not doctrines 
to me any more, but vital presences, larger if 
less precise, dearer if more unknown. Before I 
wished to know their designs, their methods, 
their thoughts ; now I desire no longer, because 
I feel that there is a force which I share with 
them. 

Yet I could not argue with a doubting spirit ; 
I could not reassure an anxious heart. I could 
only tell one who was sadly exploring dogma 
and doctrine, that he was seeking the living 
among the dead. I can turn to God as to a 
friend close at my shoulder ; but He so far tran- 
scends my thoughts that I could predicate nothing 
of Him but love and perfect understanding. 

It may be, when I come again to die, that this 



The Gate of Death 265 

will all be withdrawn from me, as all things, 
except a mere consciousness of failing life, were 
withdrawn from me before; but I shall feel, I 
know, that I am but as one shut for a space into 
a darkened room, knowing that outside the sun- 
light falls on field and tree. . . . 

I walked this afternoon, just at sunset, alone, 
along a little lane near the house, which has be- 
come very familiar to me of late, and is haunted 
by many beautiful and grateful memories. I 
was very happy in the consciousness of recovered 
strength, and yet there was a sadness of farewell 
in my mind, of farewell to a strange and solemn 
period of my life, which, in spite of gloom and 
even fear, has been somehow filled with a great 
happiness — the happiness of growing nearer, I 
think, to the heart of the world. 

The lane at one point dips sharply down out 
of a little wood, and commands a wide view over 
flat, rich water-meadows, with a slow, full stream 
moving softly among hazels and alders. The 
sua had just set, and the sky was suffused with 
a deep orange glow, that seemed to burn and 



266 The Gate of Death 

smoulder with a calm and secret fire, struggling 
with dim smoky vapours on the rim of the world. 
The colour was dying fast out of the fields, but 
I could see the dusky green of the pastures 
among the lines of trees, which held up their 
leafless, intricate boughs against the western 
glow, and the pale spaces of stubble on the low 
hills which rose wooded from the plain. The 
stream gleamed wan between its dark banks, in 
pools and reedy elbows. The whole scene was 
charged to the brim with a peace that was not 
calm or tranquil, but ardent and intense, as 
though thrilled with an eager and secret appre- 
hension of joy. 

Just at that moment over the stream sailed a 
great heron, with curved wings, black against the 
sky, dipping and sinking with a deliberate poise 
to his sleeping-place. 

So would I that my soul might fall, not hur- 
riedly or timorously, but with a glad and con- 
tented tranquillity, to the shining waters of 
death ; to rest, while all is dark, until the dawn 
of that other morning, sleeping quietly, or if in 



The Gate of Death 267 

waking peace, hearing nothing but the whisper 
of the night- wind over the quiet grasses, or the 
slow and murmurous lapse of the stream, moving 
liquidly downward beside its dark banks. 

God rests, but ceases not. Through day and 
night alike beats the vast heart, pulsing in its 
secret cell. Through me, too, throbs that vital 
tide. What pain, what silence shall ever avail 
to bind that mighty impulse, or make inanimate 
whatever once has breathed and loved ? 

THE END 



Shelburne Essays 

By Paul Elmer More 

4 vols. Crown octavo. 
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Contents 

First Series : A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau — The Soli- 
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thorne and Poe — The Influence of Emerson — The Spirit 
of Carlyle — The Science of English Verse — Arthur 
Symonds : The Two Illusions — The Epic of Ireland — 
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Whitman — William Blake — The Letters of Horace Wal- 
pole — The Theme of Paradise Lost. 



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New York London 



A' Sterling Piece of Literary Work 

THE NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES 

BY 

ELISABETH LUTHER CARY 

Author of " The Rossettis," " William Morris," etc. 

With a Bibliography by Frederick A. King 

Crown octavo. With Portrait in Photogravure. 
Net, $1.25 (By mail, $1.35) 

All of Miss Cary's work in biography and criti- 
cism is marked by the distinct note of appre- 
ciation. In such a spirit she brings her reader 
into close touch with the mental and spiritual traits 
of each author, and leaves him with a deeper im- 
pression of the general influences of the subject 
chosen for study. In her latest volume, a critical 
interpretation of the novels of Mr. Henry James, 
she has a theme well suited to her powers of in- 
sight and illumination, and as a trained writer, a 
student of character and literature, Miss Cary is 
well equipped for her congenial task. 

The intention of the book is sufficiently indi- 
cated by its title. It is an attempt to fix more or 
less definitely the impression given by the work of 
Mr. James taken as a whole accomplishment and 
reviewed with reference to its complete effect. It 
is not so much a criticism as a comment upon 
the author's point of view and the inferences he 
draws from life. An exhaustive bibliography com- 
piled by Frederick A. King, arranged logically as 
well as chronologically, completes a remarkably in- 
teresting and well rounded piece of contemporary 
criticism. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
NEW YORK LONDON 



NOV Id 1900 



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